With my recent purchase of the new Canon 7D, I have been rendering HD videos for days on my old XP computer.  Well, it turns out rendering is completely useless for HD movies longer than like 10 minutes.

If your computer freezes while rendering using programs like Sony Vegas Pro or Adobe Premier, it’s probably your computer hardware.

You will want to use 64-bit versions of any video editing software in order to render videos faster and in reasonable time.

Plus, Windows XP only supports upto 4GB of memory (and for some AMD processors even less).  Even with a 4GB Windows XP setup I had, rendering came to a crawl and never rendered completely.

So, I had a 64-bit Triple-Core AMD with 4Ghz that was running Ubuntu.  I decided to install Windows 7 64-bit version coupled with Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 64-bit version.

For Windows operating systems, you will need either Vista or Windows 7 to take full advantage of extra memory you have on your computer.

For decent rendering, I recommend at least 4 gigabytes of memory and perhaps 8 gigs if you can afford it.

Anyways, I just got the new Windows 7 64-bit plus Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 64-bit working flawlessly.  Also, I am very impressed with Windows 7 as this is the very first time I am using it.  I like how Windows 7 is more compatible with my older XP programs plus you can use most of Vista drivers for hardware.

Now, I can finally start rendering 1080P HD videos and make long movies too.

Whether I am uploading them to YouTube or making a home DVD, having the right hardware makes sense if you are going to render 1080P HD videos.

Of course, 32-bit machines will do short clips well, they just can’t handle the long ones.

Well, I hope that helps you.  If you are having trouble with rendering HD videos, try upgrading your operating system to a 64-bit OS and the software also. (minimum Dual-Core CPU and 4GB of memory)