[Bruce Bernard]

I just ordered from these folks- they had the best price for what I needed. I ordered over a weekend and the order arrived on Tuesday (regular shipping):

https://www.tapestockonline.com/

I have also ordered from this company which I would also highly recommend:

https://www.taperesources.com/

You won’t go wrong with either one.

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

Are you really sure about this? I have always read that drives last longer if they run constantly, that it is the spinning up and down that wears the motor the hardest. I have several drives that have been performing well in excess of 5 years. I know they are on borrowed time so there is nothing on them that can’t be retrieved, but they run continuously except for 2 or 3 times a year when I shut down (+ power failures!).

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

Unfortunately your question is beyond my technical expertise. I wish I would have know about putting the drives in the freezer! I have had no less than 4 Maxtor external firewire drives fail on me. Two or threee were replaced under waranty and the other failures were the replacement units. Although I have some Maxtor internal drives in some of my machines that have performed fine, quite frankly I could never trust another Maxtor drive again, especially their external drives. I just built a new machine and used Western Digital (Raptor and Caviar) as well as a Seagate from an old machine.

Good luck!

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

What are your system specs? Are the video clips located on the same drive as the program files (its best if they aren’t)?

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

I too was facing the decision whether to upgrade to Premiere Pro or switch to Vegas. I am a hobbyist, albeit it a rather serious one, so a lot of the advanced features of both programs are not of that great an interest to me.

So I downloaded the trial versions of both programs. For me, I had to balance the time to learn a new program (Vegas) versus its features and benefits. The choice turned out to be quite simple.

Premiere Pro (1.5 anyway, I can’t speak for 2.0)is the same kludgy program as the earlier versions of Premiere, just dressed up a bit. Vegas on the other hand is very intuitive, and displays most of the everyday stuff in real time without any special hardware. To get Premiere to work reasonably well you need a special board like the Matrox RTX100.

One important point is the term “render”, which is actually used in 2 contexts. In Premiere, you need to render preview files, even a simple dissolve. Dissolves render very quickly, but each time you make a change you have to re-render. (Right click, select ‘Render Work Area’) This is one command that you will quickly memorize in Premiere. If you import anything other than a file that matches your project specs, you will need to render. For example, if you have a background that is a .mov file and you import it into an .avi project, you need to render just to see your previews. Very time consuming even for a hobbyist guy.

In Vegas, “render” means outputting your project in its finished form, such as MPEG2. This type of rendering time is of no concern to me either in Premiere or Vegas becasue that’s the last step before I go to bed. That’s what we have comnputers for – to work while we sleep. But Vegas’ ability to apply filters, transitions, effects, etc. on the fly and view the changes in real time, even on a modest processor, is outstanding. I used the trial version on an AMD 1.3 chip and the results were phenomenal. I’m upgrading to an AMD dual core 4800 chip so I expect I will have even better response. For complex effects, you may need to do RAM previews or selective pre-renders, but for what I do, so far I haven’t seen the need.

The only drawback to Vegas was that it does not have the support for Smartsound (Quicktracks)like Premiere does, probably because it competes with its own Acid product. I really like Smartsound and have purchased a lot of the music. But there are several workarounds. For me, I still have Premiere so I can output my Vegas Project to .avi and then add the music in Premiere. I also have Sonicfire Pro 3 which can be used to create the music tracks. I am also experimenting with getting SFP3 to open as my default sound editor in Vegas. So far I haven’t been able to get that to work but I think I will be able to. If anyone has done that successfully please let me know.

So bottom line: Learning Vegas is well worth the effort, and if I was starting today, Vegas would be an even easier choice. Good luck.

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

Thanks so much Terje & Doug for the suggestions. I am rethinking my motherboard choice. You are right that I have no need for the SLI since I am going to dedicate this machine to editing – I am thinking about building a gaming machine later this year and the Asus MB is a good choice for that. In doing further research, I am leaning towards the Abit AN8 ultra. Has bulit in network, 1394 and 7.1 channel sound which the reviews rate OK because Abit provides a separate sound card. With the money I save on the board and these other items I can probably crank the RAM up to 4 GB, get better performance and still be $ ahead. I’ll go with either the 4400 or 4800 chip, depending on pricing and availability. The Abit board uses the nForce4 chipset which I want to stay with since I already bought the video card.

As to the burners, there are some reports of trouble with the Plextors but I think they are the best frives and would be inclined to chance it. Might go with the PX-740A which is a little less money and fewer trouble reports. Although its a stripped down model it is newer. Any specific recommendations? I naturally considered Sony but there are also some complaints about the DRU-810A.

As to monitors, I have a Dell 2405FPW that I use for gaming and general use. It truly is the “Monitor of the Gods” as one of the gaming mags described it. It’s almost too big for editing. I might go with the 20″ Dell. That I don’t need to decide right away.

Thanks again,

Bruce

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

Do you have your program and video files on different hard drives? If not, that could be the problem. I just installed Vegas on a system that is not too much greater than the minimum system requirements and I am amazed at the power of the real time effects.

mrbb, PA

[Bruce Bernard]

Hi Leslie,

After considering it for a long time I am finally switching to Vegas. I am very excited about it. Although Premiere is a great piece of software, it’s kind of like comparing a dinosaur to the space shuttle. (Dinosaurs were very powerful in their day but they don’t move as fast as the shuttle.)

Anyway, as far as the DVD logo. I am not a professional but I am a fairly serious hobbyist. You are correct that the DVD logo is a trademark and is supposed to be licensed, although I suspect that it would likely be considered in the public domain if there was a fight about it. The first time I printed a DVD label I looked into that and concluded it was best not to use the official logo.

There are several generic DVD logos that you can locate (or just make something up that says DVD). The best ones I have found came with my Epson 960 printer that I use for printing my DVDs. The printer came with software known as Epson Print CD, and it has logos that are very similar to the official ones that you see on commercial discs.

One caveat: I have no idea what the Epson license says. It may restrict the use of the logos to personal and not business use. Since I don’t use them for business I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just assumed that if a company like Epson supplied the logos, that it was OK to use them.

Good Luck,

Bruce

mrbb, PA