OK. Thanks
So am I better off bolstering my graphics card rather than get a dedicated editing card if I was to ensure that I had speedier usage of Vegas 4 & 1 DVDA (other than CPU, memory etc)?

I had ATI with TV tuner (allinone) with 8M and was working fine. Now I have ATI with 64M and preformance increased a bit.If you plan to capture analog and digital then ATI 8500DV would be your choice if you do not have firewire on board, If you have firewire on board the ATI8500 would be the best choice to capture analog as ATI capable of capture NTSC DV standard (720X480).I capture everuthing in AVI uncompressed because of more
frames to edit and better job.It does take a lot of space, but if you are for performance then AVI the best choice.

Best thing for capturing is firewire if you're planning on working with DV. A faster graphics card will not speed things up apart from Satish's plugins that can use the GPU.
This MAY change with Vegas 5, stay tuned, all has got to be revealed damn soon.

I would say that increasing Vegas' speed probably depends about 80% on the CPU, 15% on memory, 4.9% on hard drive speed & interface, and about 0.1% on everything else, including the video card.

In other words, if your goal is to make Vegas work faster, don't bother wasting a penny upgrading the video card.

OK. So maybe a video card supporting dual monitors would be the only requirment for a better expierence using vegas as far as video cards go.
I noticed in the preferences box an option for dual processor's....does anyone know how good this option accelerates vegas since this is were I will get most of my needed grunt from.

When you run a single instance of Vegas, (at least Vegas 4) you do not see a great increase when working with Vegas. It's not optimized for multithreading. Rendering to avi will not be much of an increase. However, rendering to mpeg or windows media will take good advantage of dual processors.

An area where duals would be faster is during multitasking. If you run,say, Vegas, Photoshop and Sound Forge together, it should be feel snappier with dual processors. Also you can run multiple instances of Vegas at the same time. If your workflow has this situation, you may want to get two cpus. Of course, this could change over the next week when Vegas 5 debuts.

If you can wait, you should wait for a few weeks. Sony does not provide any guidance on future releases, so those not involved with the beta tests have no idea whether support for hardware will be included. If such support is included, you will be pretty ticked off (and rightly so, in my opinion) for having made the wrong choices. If such support is not included, you will have still been able to create video with your old hardware and all you will have lost is the slower rendering times for the next few weeks while waiting to make your hardware decision.

[edit] I just read in another thread that the announcement is less than a week away.

Waiting is probably very important right now since V5 should be announced by Monday. Then you'll want to get some input off the forums from early adopters.

Points to consider:
1-I don't think you can ever go wrong with the fastest PC you can afford-no matter which NLE you decide on.

2-The Matrox Parahelia cards may be a best choice for graphics. They support 3 displays, or 2 + TV. Graphics acceleration for games may be very useful for 3d modeling tools but so far Vegas doesn't need any of this.

3-After blowing a card or two I'd recommend not using all-in-1 solutions. Consider separate 1394, Analog input, and graphics cards. And of course you need to decide if you would ever need an analog input card at all but I'd at least look at BlackMagic's Decklink cards before going for an ATI solution.

4-Decide if you will want PCI-x slots or PCI-express slots in addition to the usual slots for Decklink, SCSI, 1394b, or Gigabit Eth cards. (PCI Express will be more of an issue in 6-8 months. Right now this comes with Grantsdale chipsets which are really bleeding edge yet) And don't bother if you think it'll be a year before you do this because things will be different by then.

5-Decide if you want dual processors. Again, don't bother if you think it'll be a year before you can use it.

6-Look carefully at sound cards. There are a lot of threads on the topic. DSE has had a lot to say so hunt down his posts. I'd do your homework before asking him though as people lean on him hard with questions. I'm sure he'd appreciate your doing some research ahead of time. Anyway, the names that come up are M-Audio and Layla.

7-Finally, remember that Vegas is designed to run without hardware support. You really don't need more than a fast computer-at least with V4. Unless you have paying gigs I'd stick to a plain and fast computer.

Rob Mack

For sound input, Mackie just anounced a new Onyx line of mixers which have a firewire module that will give you all inputs into the computer. 16 channel input and a full mixer for like $1500. Beats the socks off of those MOTU and Layla units. Of course if you never want to do live recording, then it might be over kill.

JBJones

Hmmm.

One of the new features of V5 is control surface support. Perhaps you can control this mixer via Vegas.

Maybe you'd want a second 1394 card just to keep things separate?

Rob Mack