Video card for digital not analog

sgparry wrote on 11/30/2005, 12:30 AM
Right now I am doing simple projects with still photos from French Gothic Cathedrals used in a book I wrote. The photos are either from a digital camera or film scanner. My videos are all miniDV.

I like Movie Studio 6 very much and have wondered about adding a less expensive video card such as AcidVio from Canopus, mainly to speed things up with rendering.

I have a Sony Vaio430G with an extra hard drive. with a Pentium 4 2.8GHz and 512 memory. Would I be happy with just increasing memory or would a video card give me better speed in rendering and such.

What brands and models do people recommend. I don't necessarily need the cheapest but certainly not the most expensive.

Comments

IanG wrote on 11/30/2005, 1:21 AM
The video card has no effect on rendering! If you're happy with the video performance of your current card then there's no reason to change it. Adding more memory is usualy a good thing, but you'll probably get the most benefit from making sure you don't have any unnecessary processes running on your pc and having the source and destination files on separate disks.

Ian G.
sgparry wrote on 11/30/2005, 8:59 AM
Thanks so much for your reply.

Are there some tips for reducing the rendering time after making minor or partial changes to the project. Right now when I delete a frame or something of that order during the final stages, I go back to "make a movie" and it takes a vey long time to prepare the project to burn to DVD. Are there some short cuts I am missing.

I purchased Instant "Vegas Movie Studio + DVD" by CMP books but haven't found a solution. There is no index. Are there any better books out there?
IanG wrote on 11/30/2005, 11:25 AM
>Are there some tips for reducing the rendering time after making minor or partial changes to the project.

I wish! The only advice I can offer is to preview things on the timeline - often! When you think you've got everything right have someone else look at it before you render it.

Ian G.