[Bill Church]

Trevor,

With Vegas and most other NLE software, in my humble opinion and experience, when it comes to HD editing, much like gaming, it’s generally about having all the number-crunching processor horsepower you can muster, the best video card, and all the RAM the motherboard (and your wallet) will support, coupled with the data throughput rates you get operating in a 64-bit W7 environment. I’d do a little online research to see what’s out there right now at sites like Tigerdirect.com and NewEgg.com, then shop accordingly. Just remember, unless money is no object, we all have to make compromises at some point when we start comparing price points vs. performance. So, as a rule, buy as much system amd power as you can possibly afford, as you’ll never have too much machine and horsepower for the work you’ll be doing in HD, especially after your projects become more and more sophisticated. And, regardless of what you end up spending, your system is NEVER current for more than a few months…

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Bill Church]

Trevor,

While I completely agree with Matt, I can tell you that I’m having pretty good experiences, so far, with an Asus N75S laptop I very recently added to my setup. While my principal desktop NLE system (an I7 980 6-core proc, 24 GB RAM on a new Asus motherboard with GTX 560 1GB video card, running SVP 11 Pro/NB Pro titler) is the “go-to” NLE of choice, the new laptop is proving to be very indispensable in the field. In fact, I’m away from home base, editing a new project on it here in Florida this week with no problems. It is previewing up to 20 tracks, many containing nested sequences and efx, very cleanly to an external monitor, via HDMI. The N75S is an I7 quad 2GHz processor box with 8GB RAM and a Blue Ray burner, and it runs SVP11 quite satisfactorally. And, I’m finding that it is having virtually no problems playing all my HD (HDV) content from an external USB3.0 Seagate drive. The N75S also has Bang & Olufsen sound, that includes a little external sub-woofer that, amazingly, sounds quite good!

The only negative is that its video card is an Nvidia GT555M 2GB 96 CUDA core card that is not certified to run the New Blue Pro Titler software, so I run SVP Pro in the unacclerated mode (using the newest nvidia beta driver didn’t help), but it’s still plenty quick, and previews are quite smooth and natural. So far, it renders in very respecatble times, as well. Here’s the odd thing – I can import projects containing New Blue Pro titles that I created on the main NLE, and it displays, previews, and renders them perfectly. But, if I try to OPEN up those same NB title clips on the timeline in the NB Pro editing interface (or, create a new NB Pro title clip, for that matter) to trim or modify them, it immediately crashes. So, go figure. Otherwise, this is a very sweet little setup that is making me money! You might want to consider something with similar or superior specs. You might be very pleasantly surprised.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Bill Church]

Julie, the same thing happened to me when I tried to update, after Vegas had alerted me to the new build. Rather than use the restore function to get it (the original installation) back, I opted to go back to the Sony downloads page and download the update again. This time, it sailed through the installation and I was where I needed to be, in build 511, including Titler Pro and my other third-party plug-ins. It didn’t even ask for the serial number. Try it again and you should be good to go.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Bill Church]

Ken, my bad. I’d overlooked the fact that you were using an older version of Vegas Pro, and I was referring to newer versions. I don’t have Vegas 8, but Vegas Pro 9, for instance, does indeed provide the internet templates under the Sony AVC dropdown, as John had suggested. The templates also appear under the MainConcept AVC menu in Vegas 11. Sorry to confuse the issue.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Bill Church]

Ken, not to horn in on your discussion with John, but I think he might have meant for you to try one of the MainConcept AVC/AAC (*mp4) internet templates. There are six templates listed, and each can be further “customized” to acommodate your quality requirements. Hope this helps.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Bill Church]

Jeff,

I’ve enjoyed such good service from these Asus products I built, that I also decided to invest in an Asus N75sf notebook for some upcoming field work. It’s equipped with an I7 processor and even came with a built-in BluRay burner and sweet little portable Bang & Olufsen sub-woofer that sounds awesome! Very cool. But, unfortunately, it’s fully RAM populated at only 8GB (would have preferred at least 16). Even so, it boots W7 64-bit very quickly, and seems to be quite efficient. The only significant issue I’ve discovered in running SVP11 lies with the display card Asus uses – the GeForce GT555M (2GB), which isn’t certified for the New Blue Titler yet. It seems to be working much better now that I’ve installed the latest Nvidia beta driver 290.36, though. While I have set SVP11 prefs to turn off the GPU, Vegas still lets me use New Blue and it renders very quickly, so I think it’s a keeper. With a full 24 month warranty, what’s not to love?

Happy motoring!

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Bill Church]

Recently, I decided to build a new, updated platform expressly for Vegas Pro software running in the 64-bit environment and opted to go with an Asus P6X58-E motherboard with 24GB RAM, a GeForce GTX 560 GPU, and an I7 980 series six-core processor. Among the hard drives and RAID arrays I installed, I decided to go with a solid state system drive for speed and reliability, which boots up Windows 7 Pro from “cold steel” in well under 30 seconds. This system, my second Asus-based box, is running both Vegas Pro 9e and Vegas Pro 11, and it really screams. It’s also mildly over-clocked, and I’m quite pleased with the performance and stability it offers. The first Asus (quad-processor) box, which cost a whopping $1400 to build, is now more than five years old, has made me many thousands of dollars, and is still working perfectly. I built the new system, fully equipped, for well under $2K, and I believe a turn-key HP or other equivalent system would have cost several thousands more. While I am, like many others out there, still experiencing the frustrations of the Vegas Pro 11/New Blue Titler Pro combo’s frequent crashes, I certainly can’t blame it on this hardware combination. I can’t recommend this brand strongly enough to anyone considering building their own high-powered NLE workstation.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC