If you are madly in love with a particular transition, you can make it the “default” transition and apply it with CTRL+D at an edit point. Just right/click on the transition in the Effects palette and choose Default.
You are on the right track…replace the CPU and fan, choose the correct settings that match your new cpu in the bios. You may need to update the BIOS, but try without first.
Transferring video back to a mini DV camcorder is simply a copy/paste operation of data, your camcorder will not change the data. Your choice of Field options in Premiere will affect how Premiere compiles the data…choose “Always Deinterlace” by right clicking on the movie in the sequence timeline and selecting Field Options.
The error message could be true (I doubt it)…a empty frame in your timeline could cause this. Maybe the next frame after the end of your previous export. If you are running Premiere 1.5, there is an update to 1.51 that fixed some bugs like this.
A video card wont help with real time playback…your CPU is the real wiennie there. You will need at least a 3 Ghz HT P4 or better.
A better video card will help with GUI redraws and other display lag issue and the NVidia cards work well.
The purpose of the export would dictate the export settings. For local playback Windows Media Video 9 would give one of the best quality/size ratio at 2 mbps same size as original, but deinterlace in the encoder.