[Al Bergstein]

Great to hear. I’ll have to try it sometime. As usual, technology seems to get better as time goes on.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

superb info. thanks ever so much.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Ryan, when you do decide to buy, what I did was buy used through Craigslist. I had the guy meet me with the machine at the Apple store (a 2 hr drive for me), and had them do a quick diagnositics on it. Then I paid him via paypal in the store on one of their computers. This allowed me to safely meet the seller and get the machine checked out in a well lit store (if you are close to one). The machine has worked great, but it’s not the early Mac. I agree with the assessments that you *could* do it if you lower your expectations of how fast it will perform. (speed is relative, what ever you have, you’ll want more for rendering).

There seems to be lots of used machines out there for sale, so best of luck finding the right one. It’s always a tough decision of whether to buy new or used.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve had some experience (not recent but about a year ago) running Windows on a Mac under Bootcamp, and at that time I had problems with it blue screening, usually over video issues. It was so bad that when it bluescreened, it needed to have the Windows OS reinstalled (!). It was too much work, for the meager amounts of work I needed to do on bootcamp, so I gave up. And I am a *very* technical user who has worked with the Mac OS and Windows since both were V1.

Also the video card on my high end Mac laptop ran *really* hot, much hotter than when I ran the Mac natively. So hot, I was afraid to let it run overnight. So I decided to bite the bullet and get a dedicated Mac for FCP. I run one monitor and feed both machines into it. Just as an aside, I find Vegas much easier to use on a day to day basis. The comparison is that sometimes you need a dumptruck, sometimes a pickup. Vegas is like a pickup, small lightweight, fast to handle, and does my meager needs well. FCP is extremely cumbersome, in my opinion, what with it’s very specific scratch drives, log and transfer, etc. Just way more work than I need unless I’m working in a team with others using it.

Now, these issues bootcamp issues may have been fixed, and you might as well try it. But be prepared to pull the plug if you encounter blue screens. The question is what is your time worth.

I’ve also tried both virtualization tools, VMWare and Parallels. I ended up using Parallels for quite some time, and it’s quite good. Not as knowledgeable about VWWare on Mac, but it seems to be pretty well recieved. I don’t think I’d try and run something as hardware intensive as Vegas on a VM though. It’s not what these tools were made to do. The abstraction layers between the hardware, the OS, and Virtualization layer, then another OS and then Vegas, is likely to create performance problems. Virtualization was developed more for light duty use, say occasional needs for data entry, etc. I know, I worked for one of the companies that created virtualization, and know why we built it, and what the design criteria were.

But if your needs are very simple, then maybe it would work. Be forewarned, most software vendors do not offer support (like Boris?) for running their tools in a virtualized environment. It’s too hard to reproduce the problem.

And I agree with John, to do Virtualization right, you need a very fast machine, with specific processors that are developed for virtualization and the more RAM the better. For Bootcamp, you don’t need anything special since it’s just another OS running on the machine, and the only problems occur with the Apple bios, which is what likely caused my crashes and probably had something to do with the graphics card overheating under Windows.

For virtualization on Windows (Windows 7 running Windows XP) I did a lot of research before deciding that the lowest end machine that would suit my needs was an HP AMD Athalon II X4 620 Processor. This is one of the processors designed to support Microsoft virtualization. Only problem I can see is that expansion in the box is very limited, and the power supply is small. If I bought it again, I’d step up to one of the HP workstations, which cost as much as a Mac Pro. If I had it to do all over again, or when the time comes, I’m likely to sell the Mac and FCP and buy Adobe to use alongside Vegas on the same box. I have too many OS’s to manage right now (G).

I am unsure about whether all Apple machines are designed for virtualization. You *can* run virtualization on Windows machines that aren’t rated, but the ones that are work much better, run much faster. And you might be able to *run* virtualization on any Mac, but some might perform better than others.

Sorry for the long story, hope this helps make your decision easier.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I also tried this, but I couldn’t find the rendered video clip (.AVI) when I got done rendering it. It wasn’t stored in my usual rendering output folder. Do you know where it defaults to? It did not offer a place to store the rendered output… odd…

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

So did I read this right? Did you solve this by converting the files to AVI? I transcode almost everything to AVI through neoscene, as it edits better. I’ve not experienced any red files with Vegas 10.a unless the disk was somehow off line. . You might want to explore whether there is something wrong with your disk, as obviously many of us are not having the same problem you are. I’m wondering about what the guys that created your keychain camera might have done to these files. Have you seen if anyone you know has either a copy of Vegas on their machine, Final Cut Pro or Adobe to see if the problems move with them (obviously you would be transcoding with FCP). That would at least narrow it down somewhat to either your machine, Vegas or point to the camera.

Also, Did you look at your OS logs at all? See if something odd is showing up with your drives? Or run a disk tool to see if there is corruption on the drives?

Hope this is helpful. Best of luck.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Can you look at your OS and see if there was a restore point created prior to installing New Blue? If so, you may be able to have the OS rollback to just before install, which would theoretically eliminate all the installation. I’d start there. I know that both Windows 7 and Vista have restore points, I don’t know if XP did, it’s been too long.

Best of luck, that kind of installation is irresponsible. it should should be an easy thing to remove installed third party apps.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Well I sincerely apologize to Raphael, but he has helped me illustrate why trashing folks on support boards, is not useful. When he trashed me a week or so back, I was told by another board member to ‘get a thick skin.” when I do it back, it doesn’t feel as good. Hm? So let’s go forward not trashing people who are looking to get answers for difficult technical questions.

Agreed that Disk Warrior may have features, does have features not in DU, but DU is a good place to start. It’s free. Having used the Apple OS since it *first came out* I have learned to start with free utilities, and buy others as needed.

And to answer Raphael’s question as to why I’m here if I use Vegas is because I use FCP also, being forced to use it because it is the dominant package in the industry. I have a Mac Tower, a mac laptop, and two Windows machines. I have to collaborate with other video folks, and do. FCP is much harder than any package I’ve used in years. It certainly has power, but it comes at a price. I try and use the right tool for the right job, and believe that these things are tools, not religious artifacts.

Best of luck…

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

try running disk first aid or disk warrior, which some folks here find useful. But DFA is free, with the os. You might find problems in your OS or your drive. Freezing at shutdown is more likely a problem with your OS or computer hardware than with FCP, I would wager.

And yes, David is right, a mirror of your drive using an external esata drive is how I manage it. I do it weekly. It’s one of the better things that Apple does in their OS. Not as easy with Windows.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Good catch to Gary, and once again we see Rafael dishing out off the cuff nonsense.

Corrupt projects are much more likely to be the cause than the OS. That’s true in both Apple and Windows products that I’ve used. It points to problems with FCP error handling rather than Apple OS issues.

In the future, always start with a fresh sequence or project,before reinstalling the OS and Application! If some boneheaded geek at an Apple store wants to reinstall an OS or application that you’ve spent months tuning to your needs, first check using Disk Utility to make sure there are no disk errors. You don’t need to go to some expensive third party utility as Rafael suggests. Apple disk utility is plenty good for most issues. I’ve restored corrupt RAID arrays with no problem using it. It finds the issues just fine.

Alf