Originally Posted by munki

What kind of setup are you editing/rendering on?

That's gonna be your main speed up when rendering.

Most of mine is done on a quadcore with 8 gbs ram... backup and network render setups are dual cores with 4-6 gbs each. Not to familiar with the vegas setup, but assuming the program and your operating system can handle that much ram it helps a ton.

As for HD qualities... at low sizes... play with h264 encoding, and within wmvs play around with vbr settings... you can squeeze a lot in if you get used to it... sacrificing audio quality a bit can help out... I noticed your sd clip was at 160kbps... don't really need porn that high necessarily. I typically encode around 96-128 kbps depending on application.

File sizes in the 400-500 mb plus range are going to be pretty common in hd rez's though, no matter what ya do, unless you want to start using really tricky codecs your users will have to go through extra hoops with, or sacrificing quality substantially.