Hi Sherif,

1) I capture "just" HDV (1440x1080) to M2t. This is because I don´t have currently any full HD source. Hopefully soon when my budget allows it...

2) Well, let's say I'm a semi-heavy Sony FX user, mainly color correction. Sadly, I cannot compare personally to other quad core machines, since this is my first quad.

However, most of my SD color correction runs in realtime during previews (even at best quality). HD preview with semi-heavy FX is not always realtime.

Sony must soon do some homework, it seems that only the renderer can utilize all 4 cores efficiently, the preview is not loading fully the avail cores - for a reason that can only be historical (in other words, there is not at this time proper prewiev software support for 4 cores).

3) I did mention the graphics card in my list (ASUS 8800GT with 512MBDDR3)

4) Looking at the renders and the HD speed: I do not believe that a raid array would have made the renders faster. The bandwith is more than 70Mbytes/s for both the internal and external hard disks - should be enought to feed the material to and from the render engine. The raw computing speed is the barrier in my system.

My system is 100% stable, and runs Vegas 8.0b without any problems. Some minor hickups but nothing that would hinder me using the program for what it is intended for. I have to emphasize that I am running on XP x64, an operating system that Sony does NOT officially support. And certainly (and sadly) will not support in the future!!! So you must reconsider Vista 64bit if you want run Vegas 64 bit in the future. Not that I can recommend Vista for anything serious...

So far no regrets, I think I spent evey penny well. Being still the 1st on the new rendertest makes it also worth it ;)

Sony needs to improve on the quad core utilisation during editing and preview. This must happend soon. Before that we still have problems in real time preview even with moderate FX utilisation, whatever hardware we use, because all the burden is on the CPU cores.

Best regards,

Christian