First, I believe my system specs are pretty good. I think, what I may be experiencing has more to do with the fact that recently, I have adopted a policy of capturing an AVI and then converting it to an MPEG to save space. I have read comments that say that editing in the MPEG format affects preview performance and overall project quality. Is this the case?

As far as symptoms go, it mainly has to do with preview and playback performance. My computer doesn't seem to be able to keep up during preview, especially when I preview on an external monitor via fire wire. The video and audio aren't smooth, it is erractic at times.

Working natively with MPEG on the timeline will KILL your performance.

There are many (recent) threads about the issues with editing MPEG... not just related to performance... but about how this really reduces the quality of your final renders over doing all the dits with DV and doing the final render to MPEG (if you are going to DVD for instance).

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I would recommend you do EVERYTHING you can to keep your files in native DV AVI format until the absolute need arises to render to MPEG. The result of course (for me anyway) is that I now have four internal drives and 3 external hard drive enclosures with bunches of drives in removable enclosures. Sometimes I think I must be insane... and I really should find the time to more effectively manage my drive space on projects. B

First, I appreciate your responses. Now the question is if I convert my footage back to DV AVI will it retain the quality of the original footage captured in the DV AVI format?

My next move is to invest in more drive space. What do you recommend? Also, as a general rule, is it better build projects and render from an internal drive vs an external fire wire drive?

Sorry, no. Once the files are converted to MPEG the quality is permanently lost. How much quality is lost depends on the bitrate used and how good the encoder is. But once it's lost, it's gone for good.

Converting back to AVI will help editing to go faster and smoother though.

Thanks for your responce Chienworks. Fortunately I still have most of my raw footage. From this point forward I will keep all of my segments in their native DV format. I will print-to-tape to archive my final compilations a DVD as a back-up.

Apollo25

and... to add to Chienworks statements.... by rendering back to DV from MPEG you will not see probably ANY perceptable quality loss from the way the footage looks in the MPEG file (unlike what you get when you edit in MPEG and then re-render out to MPEG from that).

I mainly use external firewire and USB2 drives for capture and rendering and I see no appreciable degradation or issues related to this. There are many many posts already on this forum answering the questionas to which external hard drives to get and the issues to watch out for... so I would recommend searching this forum for "firewire drive" or something like that as you will get a much better resonse than I can do now.

I have gone for relatively "cheap" combined USB/Firewire enclosures that are pretty bulky... and have space for fitting removable hard drive enclosures. While this works for me... I am not sure this is necessarily the way that everyone would choose to do this. I find it very flexible to be able to swap hard drives in and out of my external enclosures (and between some internal Desktop systems I have as well). If it means anything... I use a Compuware 525DX FireXpress enclosure ($89 from Frys if that helps)with the UDMA133 MobileRacks from ViPower ($12 each). I use a wide variety makes / sizes of 7200prm IDE drives and cannot make a specific recommendation as I just go for the best deal I can get at the time.

Douglas Spotted Eagle has a book, "Vegas 4 Editing Workshop" who's first chapter covers numerous tweaks that can be applied to your system to make it more a more efficient editing platform. I haven't purchased the book myself (it's on my christmas list) but have read numerous excellent reviews in this forum and elsewhere online. You can pick it up at Amzon.com for right around $35.

Apollo, hope it's oke, to use your topic, but it might be helpful for you too.
I want to upgrade too, to improve the performance, especially for Vegas, and use the left over parts for a new system. So I'm looking for opinions. All based on the A7N8x DeLuxe from Asus.
I know there a lot of info on the web, however all these benchmarks seems to be focussed on 3D games.

Harddisk.
Will it increase the performance if I use the new S-ATA 10,000 rpm Raptor from WD, and should I config this drive as my OS? Using it as storage is no option, because this drive can only hold 36 Gb.

Memory.
I have 512 Mb (Oem, PC2700 DDR333). Want to upgrade to 1 Gb. The price seems very steep, but are the matched pairs of Corsair worth it? (TWINX1024-3200LLPT)

Processor.
Currently I use the 2200+. The 3000+ is fairly priced now. Is it worth the upgrade?

Videocard.
It should be dualhead, and if possible, a passive cooler.
I'm using ATI 9500 Pro now. However, I think this card, is more focussed to play games. What are my options? Will a Matrox improve the quality and reduce the heat and sound in my case?

Thanks,
Walter

Lots of good hints on performance and other video subjects at this site:

Lordsmurf

I was so impressed with all the information this guy has assembled (almost all of which I agree with) that I sent a contribution to him. People like this should be rewarded.

WVL,

Hard Drive
The 10K Raptor will probably speed up the responsiveness of your system, but it probably will not make Vegas that much speedier, becuase the big hit in Vegas is during renders. Since you will be rendering to a media drive, this will not help to much. So if you are building a system anyway, I would say the 10K rpm drive would be nice, it would probably help during mulitasking, but it's not necessary. If 36 gig is enough for your system drive and you can afford it, I say get it. However, many, many succesful Vegas systems use 7,200 RPM system drives.


Memory
Are you planning on using your old memory? Or will you replace it will 1 gig of new memory. Because if you mix pc2700 and pc3200 memory, they will all run at 2700. You can get cheaper Crucial memory than the TWINX, that is premium memory with agressive timings that useful for overclockers. If you are not planning to overclock you can probably just go with PC3200 with regular timing and latency. Also you have to make sure your Bios is capable of supporting the settings required for overclocking.

Processor
Search this board for rendertest times, and compare the 2200+ to the 3000+ and see what the difference in speed is. I would guess about 20 %, and then ask yourself is that worth the upgrade.

Videocard
If the 9500 has what you want, you probably don't need to change. If it's giving out too much heat, I would look to install a fan or a cooler just for the videocard. Matrox might have better 2D display quality, but would not affect the quality of video processed through Vegas. Vegas doesn't really use 3D power, but other software are starting to. Boris Red which plugs into Vegas uses OpenGL to speed up renders, so in that case a gamer video is useful. Other products in the video realm may start using OpenGL too.

WVL, I have no problem with you piggbacking on my initial post. We all learn from these discussions. I am not familiar with all of the hardware you mentioned. In general, your editing box should have at least 1gig memory, more is better if your board can handle it. Front Side Bus, 333 or better. I am considering building a new system based on the new AMD 64 processor. I have a friend in IT that tells me this thing is awsome. A 40 or 80 Gb primary drive @ 7200 is more than enough for what we do. I recomend using your internal large drives, 120 Gb+ for project builds and renders. It seems like you can never have enough HD capacity. This is especially true since we get better results when we edit in the native DV AVI format. The files are huge compared to the same file rendered as an MPEG. But you get better final footage and improved render times and previews to an external monitor look better as well.

Another thing that I think deserves mentioning is that we all should be using a back-up power supply with our systems. It provides steady conditioned power to our boxes that, I think, helps with system stability which is especially important with long renders. I used to have alot of problems with my system. In my opinion on of my best investments has been my APC Back-UPS.

One last thing, I love Vegas and an editing platform, however, I have been seriously looking at the Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro package which consist of Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0, Adobe Audition and Adobe's DVD Authoring Appl. Also you get Matrox's Capture Card which allows you to do preview all edits, including 3-D effects in real-time. Everything is Full-Speed, Hi-Res. You can even burn a DVD directly from the Time-Line. Another feature that I find interesiting is the ability to render in multiple formats, Media Player, AVI, MPEG etc., simultaneously in near real-time. Much of this has to do with that fact that Adobe and Matrox have worked together to make this happen. I have not used Premiere much, but from what I have done with it I much prefer Vegas 4.0. Now if Vegas got on board with Matrox, what an awesome bundle that would be...!