Standard PAL in and DV PAL out speed issue

I am working of a project that is doing my head in.

My primary video content has been supplied to me as SD MPEG2 (Standard PAL widescreen) encoded video files, to this I am top and tailing some title sequences created in After Effects/Final Cut (Apple DV format), and overlaying the whole lot with a continually horizontal crawling message created using a Vegas Media Generators. The final Render has to be DV PAL. Its taking 24 hours to render 60 minutes, and then i'm getting all sorts of interlace problems.

I need to speed up my workflow, and thinking of ways to do it. I'm supposed to be turning out 60 minutes of edited content everyday - but can't be spending 24 hours rendering.

I am guessing that reason for such a slow speed is the content fields need to be flipped (DV PAL and Standard DV have opposite field dominance) for every frame, along with compositing the horizontal crawl.

Unfortunately the crawl has to be put on in post, as I am making a few edits to the original content, and if it was put on in production would appear to jump about a bit.

One solution is I record the original content to DV (Using something like a Sony DVCam deck, then at least the content will be in native DV to start with.

My System Should have enough Horse Power. But I only ever get aboy 30% CPU Utilisation when doing this render. I'm using a Quad Core Xeon 2.6Ghz, 4Gb RAM, Dual HHD (project on one disk, render to the second) and an Nvida Quadro NVS290 video car. I also have a Black Magic extreme card installed for driving an external SDI preview reference monitor and external VU/PPM meters, and its SPDIF output to drive an External Audio Amp.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks in Advance

Matt, I really can't figure it out. I have now transcoded all my source material into Quicktime PAL-DV codec (The ultimate container & codec the broadcaster requires) thinking that if Vegas didn't have to transcode the source material it might speed things up. The project is set up as a PAL DV lower field first (as native DV should be), and i'm rendering as a QuickTime 7, Apple DV-Pal Codec.

I will admit I am compositing several layers, and expect a bit of grinding. However even though I have the resources available (Quad Core 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU, and 4Gb RAM and separate source and destination SATA II hard drives), and have set Vegas's priority to HIGH in task manager, its only using 25-30% of CPU and 350Mb RAM - The machine is 75% Idle, whilst I wait 21hour to render a 60 minute TV show.

It strikes me Vegas just cant use the resources available to it.

Keith