One more question: is Vegas happier with XP or XP Prof? Or does it matter?

is Vegas happier with XP or XP Prof? Or does it matter?

Shouldn't matter.

as long as you're running XP or at LEAST win 2000 you're gravy
You might try to set your preview window to good instead of best and also
make sure that you decrease the size of your preview window to around 320 x 240 or so
that should give your movie plenty of free ram to get halfway decrent previews

For preview, here's my strategy:

1. Connect a DV camera via firewire and an NTSC/PAL monitor to the analog outputs of the camera to get external monitor preview;

2. Set Vegas preview settings to "Preview, Full" to check frame rate and timing;

3. Set Vegas preview settings to "Good, Full" or "Best, Full" to check interlacing, color correction and image quality.

4. Selectively pre-render to get full resolution, full frame rate preview when numbers 2 & 3 aren't good enough.

I am old TV guy too. My puter is about 2 years old 512k 1.5mhz, and Vegas runs great. I feed DV into it and get great DV and DVD out. I have mixed and matched footage from BetaSP and even D2, & D3. The stuff cuts together great. My playback preview does vary depending on the complexity of the effects, but can always adjust controls to see what I need too in real time.

The only problem I have from my old analog days is the feeling knowing I have a 2 hour render ahead of me even after I have just watched a seemless preview via firewire and my GL-2 to a monitor.


Once you get use to the interface you will be amazed at its versatility and power.
Have fun
Phil

Thanks Phil. I really like a lot about VV so far and considering I haven't done extensive training, I'm doing great. Some of the functionality is awesome. It's the non-editing part that's making me crazy. Couldn't get my Firewire to recognize a Canon ZR40 camera for the life of me and spent lots of time on the phone with tech support from Canon and my computer manufacturer to no avail. Decided to digitize S-Video thru my ATI All-in-Wonder. The output has been even nuttier. I'm happy with my previews, knowing they're low-res and all that. However, in trying to get a high quality output to make sure it all looks great, I'm having trouble. The renders in QT or AVI format bog down my computer so that the file's barely play. I rendered in other formats with more compression to check the motion and while I can see it's smoother, the quality is degraded to accomplish that. So it's a lot of catch 22's. Last night, I actually rendered 5 different 600mb uncompressed files and burned onto 5 different cd's, brought them to work today, imported them into Discreet Edit and put them into a timeline only to discover that the video was really jittery. Either some slow-mo's I did didn't work well or the render/import caused frame/field issues. So I've removed the slo-mo tonight and rendered 360x243 in QT Sorenson to see if it looks okay and it seems to. I just wish I could trust my computer monitor, ya know. I don't have the DV Cam anymore (borrowed from my boss) so I can't hook up a monitor for external preview-- and wonder if I did, whether I'd get a 30fps full screen output from my computer anyway. Ugh.

Don't mean to whine. I actually have to support our department for the Edit boxes at work, so I'm used to a fair amount of troubleshooting (those babies work on NT4.0 SP5 so you can imagine and now Discreet has discontinued Edit) difficult setups. I wish my previous experience was more helpful in this realm.

Digitizing thru your ATI all in one may be a dodgy link in the chain - Vegas is set up to accept firewire material, whether it's DV or analogue fed through a converter (or camera).
If you're having quality issues I'd really try and compare something done without the ATI.

Maybe a dumb question but are you rendering to uncompressed avi/QT? Generally speaking, unless the input is high res, it is best to render to AVI DV (PAL /NTSC) especially if the source is DV or less...You should find render times improve significantly, get smoooooth playback (including slo-mo etc..) and a nice preview to external monitor too...

Sorry if I'm barking up the wrong tree!

regards

Paul.

Vegas handles a lot of formats very well, but really works best with DV.

Make sure you have an OHCI-compliant DV card (no big deal, less than $50).

Also, Canon has had some history of somewhat dodgy firewire implementation. You may want to try another DV cam. My Sony TRV-18, PD-150 and Panasonic AG-DV1000 all work perfectly with Vegas. If you're digitizing analog (i.e., non-DV) footage, I would suggest using the analog inputs of a DV camera, deck or converter connected to an OHCI firewire card.

Canopus (www.canopus.com) makes a nice variety of analog/DV converters, including a couple connected to an OHCI PCI firewire card.

This is great, I REALLY appreciate everyone's input.

So lemme ask you a question: if I already have an OHCI Firewire port (3, actually) built-in on my computer (an eMachines T2200... and please, don't everyone laugh at me with my eMachines) do I still need another card? I bought a Pinnacle DV card and had no better luck with its firewire than I did on the built-ins. Are you guys thinking it's really the camera? Or do I need BOTH a different camera AND a DV card such as one from Canopus.

And, while I'm asking questions... aside from the obvious price difference, is there any reason to buy a Canopus 100 vs. a 50?

Gosh, so so so so so much to learn.

Me again. Another question. I have access to a Targa 2000 DTX capture board. Would installing this help me any with Vegas?

Check "System Manager" in Windows and look at the drivers for your firewire ports. If it says "Microsoft OHCI IEEE-1394 Device," it should be OHCI compliant. There are other variants of OHCI devices (such as Via, TI), that may or may not conform to the OHCI standard. If you see one of these other drivers, you may want to force the device to use the Microsoft Driver and see if this works better.

FWIW, I have an $18 OHCI card in my machine that works flawlessly, so more expensive is not necessarily better when it comes to firewire.

While I'm thinking of it, one other cheap thing to try is to try another firewire cable. Sometimes the connections or the wire itself goes bad, leading to all kinds of unpredictable behavior.

If I recall correctly, the major difference between the Canopus 50 and 100 is that the 50 allows only analog-to-DV conversion, while the 100 is bi-directional.

Hope this helps.

Oh, and by the way, when you say "renders to AVI or QT bog down your machine," what codec are you rendering to?

If you're using DV footage and have project settings and saved files all set to the same standard DV template, you will still have to render effects, but playback of unfiltered events should be pretty smooth.

Finally, do you have a separate A/V hard drive, or are you keeping media files on your boot drive? The former is much preferred for smooth output.

seperate Hd is critical, I experienced tons of issues, mos all fixed with a dedicated slave hd for video processing. Also, If you decide to take anything to work and run it on discreet again....make sure you use the NTSC format for best cohesion of effects and such. Hope it helps!

I do use a separate HD for my video, I'm with you on that one. As far as the NTSC goes, do you mean "NTSC DV"? There are so many formats and honestly, and humbly, since i work at a TV station I've never had any choice other than plain ole NTSC, ya know. As somewhat of a "strong user," I know what codecs are and have learned a bunch about them but since the Edit* requires Targa MJPEG codec'ed AVI's, I never really investigated all the various options and their strengths or weaknesses. Someone asked me what I meant when I said QT or AVI renders bogging down in a mssage above and it's not the render, per se, it's the result. When I try to render something 720x486 in a QT or AVI file, my computer just won't play it. It certainly tries, but it can't handle the file size or date rate or whatever. Thus, I don't feel like I'm certain beyond a reasonable doubt that my "piece" is where I want it to be.

Last night I was able to get a 640x480 QT rendered that I uploaded to our FTP site at work, from which I brought it in to an Edit* system and it played no problem and I finally saw that my slo-mo's were really jittery. It's this kind of "proofing my work" that is so frustrating since I don't know all the various Codec/Render optimal options.

Learning a lot, that's for sure! I thank every one of you for all of your seemingly endless patience with me!!!!
-Howard