[David Shirey]

Anthony, I’m in the same boat in that I have no interest in loading Vista. I’ll be waiting for Windows 7 before I think about changing operating systems. Until then if you want faster editing then CPU upgrades are going to help more than ram, especially with the ram limit (3.3 gigs I think?)

As for your original question, obviously it depends on what kind of money you’re looking to spend, but nothing helps workflow like more screen real estate. 22″ Acer screens were mentioned and they’re certainly a good bargain, but for my personal taste, I just don’t enjoy having two separate screens unless you’re just using the second one as a monitor. I prefer just having a single 24″ at 1920×1200 so everything can be kept on one display, then an external television as a monitor. That may be overkill unless this is a big birthday, but even one 22″ would be a big step up from that 17″.

[David Shirey]

So you’re editing in Final Cut Studio on your MacBook Pro, then using bootcamp to load WinXP to use DVD Architect? I’ve never tried that setup, but as long as the burner works then DVD Architect should burn it fine. I have successfully burned blu-rays both from Vegas, and also iso’s that we transferred over from Encore on our macs.

[David Shirey]

I guess the easiest way to explain is that AVC is more advanced, and can carry the same quality as mpeg2 but with a lower bitrate. So just because AVC is at 16mbps and MPEG2 is 25mbps, doesn’t mean that mpeg2 is better. AVC is already what you’re recording in, and will allow you to fit more data on each disc, so there’s no real advantage to convert it to mpeg2.

[David Shirey]

[Steve Wargo] “I would personally stay away from any Toshiba laptop. Every one I know of has gone in for repairs.

But, that aside, an Express slot is an Express slot. There is no difference as far as the cards are concerned.”

I know it’s just anecdotal evidence but I’ve been using a refurbished Toshiba laptop for over a year without a single problem. I’ve had problems in the past with the build quality of dell and hp units.

[David Shirey]

Don’t worry Leslie, that’s why we have great mods and helpful users who do have the time and ability to help newer users.

In addition to auto-ripple, I have a little script that I bound to Ctrl+W that I’ve found very helpful. It’s called SelectEventsFromCursor.js and I think I got it from Edward’s site https://www.jetdv.com/

What it does is just select every event on each track from the current cursor position forward, then you can drag the whole piece and close the gap. I find it useful because I often end up using transitions of varying length between clips, so closing gaps would still just leave me with a cut and I’d have to grab everything anyway.

[David Shirey]

Thanks Chris, we’ll give that a try!

[David Shirey]

[Steve Rhoden] “It seems you missed a particular setting during the initial
setup in DvD Architect for that to occur.
Make sure you always use the “preview Disc” feature
to fully analyze how the disc will play when finished authored.”

Well yes it did look fine in the preview window. It’s when I played it in the PowerDVD 8 software after burning to a dvd-r that the problem occurred. I tried playing another bluray on dvd-r that we created on the macs then burned the .iso on my pc using DVDA5, and that just crashed my computer entirely. At this point I’m ready to just assume it’s PowerDVD8’s problem and not anything in DVD Architect.

[David Shirey]

I went from an e6600 to an e8400 in the spring and while the difference didn’t blow me away, it was certainly worth the $200 the e8400 cost me back then. Go for it.

[David Shirey]

This is how I’ve always created mpeg2’s for architect, but can anyone explain why DVD Architect can’t support a standard DV NTSC mpeg2 file? I realize using the DVD Architect dv ntsc format allows it to embed chapter stops and other architect-specific stuff, but why couldn’t it take a simple mpeg2 and place that on a dvd just as easily as any other without rerendering?

I think this would be a nice ability to have, because on occasion we’ve needed projects I’ve already rendered to mpeg2 to be brought over and used in DVD Studio Pro on the macs but obviously the DVD Architect specific mpeg2’s won’t work. For short projects that don’t need any fancy meta data it’d be nice to use a more universal format.

[David Shirey]

Well this is part of Excalibur, but I just had to bind MatchAspect ratio to Alt+M because I’m always dropping jpeg’s of various sizes into my projects and it’s convenient to quickly crop them so that I can add movement in Event Pan/Crop