[Mike Kujbida]

You’re quite welcome Ralph 🙂
If you’re going to NAB next week, bring back some of their (much warmer than us) weather with you please!!

[Mike Kujbida]

Videoguys just posted their newwest DIY article, DIY6: Quad Core System.
As you can see, prices HAVE dropped a lot since I bought mine 🙂

[Mike Kujbida]

[Gary Chvatal] “If you don’t mind me asking, how spendy is a system like that?”

No problem Gary.
I paid around $4,000.00
Two things to keep in mind about my price.
#1 is that I’m in Canada which means slightly higher prices.
#2 is that it was purchased over a year ago and prices have dropped a LOT since then.

[Mike Kujbida]

Something is very strange here.
When you click in the “save as type” box, MPEG-2 should be the 8th item on the list.

ATRAC audio
Audio Interchange File Format
Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro
Dolby Digital AC-3 Studio
FLAC
MainConcept AVC/AAC
MainConcept MPEG-1
MainConcept MPEG-2

All I can suggest at this point is to contact Sony Customer Service and see if they have any ideas.
Sorry 🙁

[Mike Kujbida]

Trust me when I say to go for at least a 24″ monitor.
I have one and my kids’ 20″ looks positively puny beside it.
I went with a Dell 2407 but it’s no longer available.
A co-worker of mine recently bought a 28″ I-Inc from Tiger Direct (I’d never heard of the brand either) but he loves it!!

[Mike Kujbida]

Sorry Ray but, since I’m still running 32 bit XP, I really haven’t paid a lot of attention to those posts.
You can do a search on the Sony Vegas forum on vista 64 bit and I’m sure you’ll get several hits.
There’s nothing wrong with going with a system like you’re talking about.
You can always switch over to Vista (or Microsoft 7 when it gets released) at some point in the future.
BTW, the only reason I didn’t go Vista when I got my new machine was because it was still new on the market and I didn’t want to be a guinea pig.

[Mike Kujbida]

Ray, based on numerous threads on the Sony Vegas forum I know that there are several folks running 64-bit versions of XP & Vista with very few problems.

Sony is supposed to be showing the 64-bit version of Vegas at NAB next week with delivery promised “later this year”.
It’s supposed to be for Vista 64 only though 🙁

[Mike Kujbida]

“eSATA is just the external version of SATA”

Thanks for the correction David.
Too many buzzwords to remember these days 🙂

[Mike Kujbida]

I gave the specs to a local PC shop and had them build it for me.
My machine’s specs were based on John Rofrano’s system who based his on John Cline’s system.
I forgot to mention that the package also included a 24″ Dell monitor.
If I was going to change anything, I’d add a 2nd 24″ monitor.
You can never have too much screen real estate 🙂
My hard drives are only SATAs and I believe eSATA is the latest “flavour” of them.
If you’re going into HDV/AVCHD, you might want to consider a RAID system of some kind. My needs are not extreme so I decided against it.

[Mike Kujbida]

Here’s the link to the Intel price drop I was talking about.