jboy,

Thanks for the assist. Apparently IRQ optimization is critical. I've opted to try Standard-PC over ACPI and have found much improvement. (ACID works!) But like you mentioned, my IRQ settings remain auto-configured. I need to know how to manage IRQs better in Win2k Pro...

Current Standard-PC IRQ configuration:

IRQ 11 - ATI Technologies Inc. RAGE 128 GL AGP Display adapter

IRQ 11 - M Audio DiO 2448

IRQ 9 - VIA USB Universal Host Controller

IRQ 9 - VIA USB Universal Host Controller (again)

IRQ 9 - Intel(R) PRO/100B PCI Adapter (TX) #2

(Processor speed: AMD 751 Processor at 705 MHz)

Your processor's a little on the slow side. Acid works with W2Kpro fine on my machine, with ACPI enabled. From what I've read on this subject,I suspect your problem is unrelated to ACPI. I wish I could help you more, but am not sure you're going in the right direction. You still haven't described the exact nature of your problem, but if its as I infered in my first post, then the problem could be explained by your processor and ram limitations. When you render out your creations, does the rendered file skip on playback then ? Can you copy your work to tape, and does it skip when you play the tape back. Vegas is designed to drop pieces of information during the editing stage, if your hardware requires more headroom. Since its a software NLE, the faster the machine it runs on, the better it will run.This means that if you experience occasional loss of smoothness , both audio and video, on your editing timeline on a slow machine, dont be surprised and dont worry. If your rendered footage is flawed, then you have a problem.Also, you may be experiencing some sort of driver conflict with one or more, of your other pieces of hardware. What are the capacities and rpm speeds of your hard drives ? Do you have the latest drivers installed for all your hardware ? Whenever some piece of software doesn't work, people seem to be inclined to blame the software, while in my experience, it's almost always, 9 times out of 10, a configuration or driver problem.

>>> I need to know how to manage IRQs better in Win2k Pro...

I've found it works best to configure IRQ's in BIOS. just make sure you set Plug N Play OS to 'NO' (should 'no' by default). and then you should be able to assign IRQs to each slot. many Motherboards share IRQ's between the AGP and the PCI slot right next to it and also may share a couple other slots and there isn't anything you can do about that except try to put 'friendly' things together. this usually takes experimentation and varies greatly depending on what hardware is being used.

using this method you can prevent two cards from sharing the same IRQ. for example, you could put your Firewire card in slot 2 and your sound card in slot 3, and then assign IRQ 5 to slot 3 (sound) and assign IRQ 4 to slot 2(Firewire).

for the most part, most new hardware works well sharing IRQ's but sometimes you just gotta give 'em their own.

kleblanc,

I agree with Cheese - if your cards are not behaving on their own, you can either:

1. Switch cards around in different slots and see what happens
2. Force the IRQ in the BIOS. Sometimes this is only way to get things separated.

Cheers,

Cuzin B

Cheese & CuzinB,

Thanks for the assist. I rearranged my PCI expansion cards according to my BIOS and Motherboard's documentation. I found 3 unshared slots and decided to use these for Audio, Firewire, and the UltraSCSI adapter. The other 2 PCI slots are shared with the AGP slot. I'll set my Ethernet adapter here since I use it sparingly. Any glaring conflicts here?

jboy,

Thanks for the tips. I know my system's not up to speed for deluxe video editing. I was hoping that it is fast enough to do photo montage work with panning and crossfade transitions, etc. I want to render to digital video, MPEG and/or AVI.

Please tell me more about the buffer settings in Vegas you referrenced.

Thanks,

K Leblanc