[Ernest Lee]

I am not a computer engineer or Hollywood production professional; however, here is some information that will be useful for the serious home video production hobbyist.

I have an older Sony Vegas video-editing software and it does work with Windows 7. I don’t have the version with me off-hand because I am at work; however, I recall distincly the manual was published in 2005.

It is loaded into a Compaq desktop with Windows 7. The project rendered fine without taking longer than on my HP Windows XP computer.

The problem occurred after I exported the rendered material to the DVD Architect Studio that came bundled with the Sony Vegas at that time. When I try to prepare for the burn (the step prior to actually hitting the button to burn the DVD) I get a message that states something to the effect that it is not compatible or I do not have access rights. Obviously it is not the latter, so there is a compatibility issue.

Online forums seemed confused as to the solution and none of the free downloads for drivers worked.

So I Googled Sony Vegas and see that they now sell DVD Architect Studio 5.0 that is compatible with Windows 7. I will download their free trial and if it works I will buy it.

By the way, I have been on several forums and see people seem to have problems with their video editing/production software when there are multiple software loaded on the computer. If you have software from Ulead, Sony, etc. all loaded at the same time, you can run into a problem, your program might not work. That happened with me.

Actually the Ulead and Sony software being loaded simultaneously is not a problem. The problem was that I bought a FireWire PC card to install into my new Compaq computer (I don’t buy the computers with these pre-installed because the retailers jack up the prices – just buy after-market cards on amazon.com and get the card for around $7 – free shipping and no tax). The FireWire card worked perfectly. I opened the computer, plugged the card into the slot, and presto-magico I was able to import video from my mini-DV camcorder. I did not have to preload a driver from CD as the card was automatically detected. The problem was this card autoloaded a video editing/production software and this made BOTH my Sony and Ulead video production software nonfunctional.

So I found the name of the software that autoloaded with the FireWire PC card and went to the Windows Control Panel and removed it. When I did, both the Ulead and Sony video production programs worked fine.