Thank you as always Kelly. I will give that a try, and get back with you to let you know how it turned out. Could be a while, as from what I have seen so far, they weren't very familar with the 'pause' button ;) Take care. Cin

I hear ya. Someone gave me a 2 hour tape of their kids in a parade to edit. It was about 6 minutes of their kids, and about 114 minutes of their feet and pavement.

Had to laugh at your post Kelly. 'Am there, doing that.' I had to take Dramamine just to watch the video, and now I'm supposed to make a 'silk purse out of a sow's ear!' Converted 4 hours yesterday (55 Gigs) using my ruined (can't film with it, but still can run video thru it) Sony DCR-TRV840 as you suggested, and it did a pretty darn good job, but I would love to save my pennys and invest in the Canopus ADVC 300 you recommended. Read a lot about it, and 95% was positive. I have at least 50 of my own VHS tapes that I need to get to one of these days. Just a couple of questions for someone, 1.because it is such a large project I am using an external hard drive for the first time (150G Maxtor USB). Will that slow down my project as my computer will have to keep going back and forth with this drive to get and give data, as opposed to keeping everything just on the computer? 2. I know Vegas is a non-destructive editor, but man would I like some destruction! For whatever reason, after 4 hours of capture, I only got 3 scene clips (they are huge!) Is there a way when I cut a secion of video to easily delete it permanently from my hard drive to make some room, and leaving a small useable clip? 3. When I don't 'split' the clip, and just drag an end (sometimes for a long ways) does that make my project bigger, or use more resources, or render times longer as oppossed to splitting and deleting? 4. Is there a way to 'mute' a section of audio without having to split it out? I have tried creating a region over the spot, and then selecting 'mute', but it mutes the whole clip. I know I could play around with audio envelopes, but I was looking for a 'quick fix,' somehow highlight and mute just the spot. 5. They shot this video with the date and time on it, which I hate. Is there anyway to remove the metadata (I think that's what it is) to get rid of it? Well, I guess that's enough for now, I better get back to work........I mean fun ;)

For "muting", use a volume envelope to adjust volume up or down in sections. I think the help will give details on how to do it.

1) The data transfer rate to your external hard drive is likely 8 to 12 times higher than the demands of a DV video stream. So unless you've got the frame split up into 9 simultaneous tracks playing all at once you shouldn't notice much difference.

2) In these cases i trim the original clip down to what i want to keep on the timeline, render that to a new DV .avi file, then delete the original file. Use this new one for the project.

3) Nope.

4) What Mike said.

5) Since the original was VHS then the date/time is imprinted right in the video frame. It's not a separate data stream that can be turned off. Why on earth do so many people leave that display on so often??????? *sigh* Seems like at leat half of what's shown on America's Funniest Home Videos has the date/time stamp on it. You do have the option to crop if the subject is mostly in parts of the frame where the date/time stamp isn't. If the date/time stamp is over pavement or ground you could try using the cookie cutter to paste unadulterated ground over the date/time stamp. Might look ugly, but it might look less ugly than that display.