The only difference are slight changes to the movies, in fact removing the outlines from titles because they did not look so good.

There was a hardware modification ,though. I converted by video drive into a removable drive so that I can occasionally make backups onto another removeable backup hardrive. I am aware that there may be a heat problem, after reading some of the postings, although the casing for the removable drive comes with its own fan.

To test this theory, I tried rendering to my main drive, with the same result. Then I tried rendering an AVI version to my main drive, and this worked (4.5 gig compared to 211 megs for the mpeg movie). I then rendered the AVI file to mpeg onto my dedicated video drive and this also worked. But I cannot figure out why I can't render straight to mpeg 1, except for a few seconds.

Hmmmm. I don't quite follow the drive/file management.

C drive = Operating System + VF with its project, backups, and pre-renders?
E drive = Captured media + Rendered Files?
"X" drive = removeable backup hard drive = ?

All daisy chained via firewire?

You can't render from the timeline straight to mpeg 1 on C? You can render from the timeline to AVI on C. You can render C's AVI file from the timeline to E? Kinda sounds like the render is reaching out for a media clip and not finding it where it thinks it should be????

Not much help, but I've been wrestling with PTT issues on my system and anything in this ballpark interests me. Good luck. Grob

I seem to have solved the problem. I uninstalled VF and then re-installed it - a complication may have arisen when I was trying out demo versions of both Vegas 3 & 4, and the fact that I recently bought the mpeg 2 plugin. So I unistalled all the programs and re-installed VF, and it rendered to mpeg1. Hopefully it will do the same when I re-render tonight.

To clear some confusion:

C drive has all my programs running under XP.

F drive is a dedicated video drive for all projects, media files and renders. This drive has been converted to a removeable drive so that I can slot in my backup drive for the occasional ghosting. Other than this feature, F drive works as it has before, as my secondary slave drive.

Backup