[Anoni Moose]

In any case, I’d suggest making sure a backup of that disk is done first, even if it’s not supposed to be destructive.

🙂

[Anoni Moose]

“As a side note, the dual layer disk buring capability of the 6.0 version (over the 4.0) is great, just make sure that the intended audiance has a machine that will play dual layer format.”

Note that most “normal” DVD’s one would buy with movies on them are dual layer. IOW, all DVD players handle dual layer.

[Anoni Moose]

Really shouldn’t much matter one way or another. The hyperthreading feature was more of a cosmetic feature than anything else done for marketing purposes to make people think they were getting what’s now called dual-core (before Intel actually had one — AMD was eating Intel’s lunch technology-wise for a few years). But due to reasons I won’t go into here, its effectiveness was only very slight at best. So it doesn’t really matter.

[Anoni Moose]

Assuming you’re talking about the preview’ing monitors that “connect” to Vegas…

A monitor calibration device may be able to help you adjust things more optimally inasmuch numbers are a little easier to adjust than eyeballing small tweaks.
But it’s a profiler that might help them look much more alike (after doing calibration first of course).

I asked a question about the algorithm I thought of doing as a comment in another thread, got no comments, but it seemed solid at least theoretically. At least when the monitor is attached to a computer as an active screen (rather than a firewire attached unit).

A Video monitor connected to a video-card with suitable video out can be used as a computer screen (in Window XP anyway). On that, calibrator/profiler units like the Monaco one I use (almost mandatory for Photoshop sorts of use on a LCD screen) would calibrate it as well as profile it producing a custom ICC/ICM profile. Somewhere in Vegas is a place where the ICC/ICM profile can be set to the one one creates (I’ve run across it somewhere, don’t recall where, and also seen a writeup somewhere saying that Vegas supports using it). It’s that profile that “finishes” the job in getting the screen to look very close to perfect. Or at least that how it works for the main screen for photo work.

The “Pro” version of Monaco’s software (which I got as a “free” promotional bonus upgrade during a “sale”) also has facility for having multiple monitors match (intended for commercial houses where having all the monitors in the place match is perhaps more important than they being correct).

Anyway, still haven’t tried it. My work is of a quality level (for video) where those sorts of errors wouldn’t be noticed due to the mess ups elsewhere. 🙂

[Anoni Moose]

Yes, runs very fast on that chip. The oft mentioned rendering benchmark (originally made for Vegas 3) takes 28 seconds on the e6600 and that has only been beat, to my recollection, by faster versions of the Conroe. There has been a thread on the Sony forum site periodically. Do a search on “Conroe” there and you should be able to find the results.

[Anoni Moose]

You’ll like those Taiyo Yuden disks, I use those and they work very well.

Using a Plextor PX-716A drive (and Nero) they burn at 16x with great reliability. Sound strange you say? 🙂 The algorithms used by Plextor for their intelligent “unknown brand” methods were developed with the help of Taiyo Yuden, so needless to say they burn known Taiyo Yuden discs very well. Plextor comes with software to measure error rates on the burnt disk. Burning the 8X Taiyo Yudens at a x16 rate (which btw REALLY burns at 7~8x most of the time, going up some from there only on the disk’s outer area) show a VERY VERY low data error rate (errors before correction, it’s “none” after correction). A very impressive disc/burner combo. FWIW. Burning ’em slow probably makes it super-incredibly good.

Mike

[Anoni Moose]

I’ve a firewire-DV <-> Analog box that I currently use for previewing, but it seems like the S-video output on the video card (Nvidia 7600 GT based) when used as a secondary windows screen would allow me to use my Monaco Optix color calibrator/profiler on the video screen. I recall from somewhere Vegas can use an ICC profile and this might yield a very accurate display. Haven’t tried this though, would it be worth the effort or just continue using the firewire “path”? The firewire “path” can’t use the calibrator — only works on something that can be a windows screen — unless there’s a way to make it put a desktop out the firewire port.

Might the svideo + calibrator path work?

[Anoni Moose]

Although I haven’t tried it, isn’t “Wax” that gets mentioned from time to time something that allows virtual-dub plugins to work as a plugin to Vegas?

[Anoni Moose]

Whenever I’ve seen this asked on a forum, responses usually just argue strongly against the use of labels on DVDs.

The “standard answer” is to just not do it and to print directly on the disks. A lot of inexpensive inkjet printers can do so.

So consider this answer “done”.

Personally, I use a sharpie permanent pen. Not too commercial of a product and graphics rather limited, but it works for me.

Now, if you’re talking about DVD case labels: photoshop, corel(draw/paint), etc would do fine.

[Anoni Moose]

I just upgraded my formerly AMD system, and after a lot of web research picked something similar to your proposed system. I chose the little faster Core 2 Duo E6600 and went for the 2GB of memory up front with a “matched 2x1Gb set”, but your E6400 and 1GB should be fine.

I also got a 7600 GT, I don’t think it was needed for vegas, but I liked that it had no fan. I’ve gotten to not like fans, especially tiny ones because they’re both whiney/noisy/loud and in my experience unreliable (and often not replaceable, esp on video cards). So got the Gigabyte version of 7600 GT with no fan. Likewise got the Gigabyte 765P-DQ6 motherboard that has no fan. Both have big heatsinks and lots of heatpipe plumbing.

A real nice sweetspot for hard disks at the moment is the one you mentioned. That 320GB Seagate SATA2 drive which goes for about $95 including postage from Newegg (or it used to, might be cheaper by now 🙂 . I added three of them. One for the ‘C:” OS boot drive, and another two which I RAID-0’d (and is used for video). I’ve still two other older PATA drives as well left over from before the upgrade (albeit with PATA->SATA converters seeing as how the new MB had only enough PATA interfaces for the optical drives).

I think you’re going in a good direction.