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[jeditdv] “I’d be getting it fixed or use another camera to capture. USB capture is much lower quality than firewire.”
Just for the record Ed it us not. With the Panasonic camcorders, the USB “capture” is the same as FireWire capture. The raw bitstream from the tape is transfered, as is, to the PC. It requires USB-2 of course, but it is still the same quality as FireWire.
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For Vegas, FireWire is your only option. Vegas doesn’t really support capture or print to tape via USB. On my camcorder the FireWire port is dead, so USB-2 is my only option. I capture using Windows Movie Maker, which works fine. I have not yet had the need to print to tape but I would expect that to work fine as well. You should be able to create an AVI file in Vegas, open it in Windows Movie Maker and print to tape over your USB-2 connection.
This assumes you have XP since Movie Maker comes with XP.
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Your XL1 stores the video as a digital stream on the tape. When you “capture”, which is a misnomer when it comes to DV, you store the exact bitstream that is on the tape to your computer. There is no advantage to capture in any other format.
After your capture there may be advantages to up-sampling and working with other formats, I do not know, but no advantage during capture.
Also, of course, you don’t need a capture card for your XL1, you “capture” using FireWire.
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Think your best bet is Photoshop. Make the credit roll in PS and scroll that in Vegas.
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Also, depending on your video card, you can have the display part of Windows Media Player go to your secondary monitor. My Matrox video card can send the video signal to my secondary monitor out a SVideo port on the card, which I can plug into my Camcorder, and voila, nice recordings.
This depends on your video card though.
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Having used a few different NLEs lately, this is the one area where I would recommend another package over Vegas. Please note this is the ONLY reason for recommending this, but Ulead Media Studio Pro does a reasonable job of allowing you to edit MPEG-2 and only recompress what is needed. In general I wouldn’t recommend MSPro over Vegas, but in this one and very particular case, Ulead does indeed do it better than Vegas.
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Rendering is a very CPU intensive process and therefore “taxing” your computer more than most tasks you can run. If you were a software developer, you would probably find that running a full build of your system would make the same thing happen.
You are saying that your main HD is making bad noises, which is ominous. The fact that Vegas is freezing, and as it appears, with any render job, is not necessarily an indication that there is a problem with Vegas, Vegas is just what makes the problem surface. Last time I ran into a bad drive it started with Ulead Cool 3D locking up regularly when rendering to uncompressed AVI. A few days later the PC would randomly lock up during restart, and finally, after two weeks, it would no longer start.
The way Windows is designed ensures that several of the components Vegas relies upon is installed on your main drive, most notably Windows XP it self. If your main drive is failing, the first symptoms are often that your most taxing applications are failing. The OS is loading dynamic components from your main drive, and this loading may fail, or bad data may be read.
Also look at the advice from the other posters. If you have many HDs in your case, they will generate a significant amount of heat. This heat will make components of your PC fail randomly, the heat will also, over time, permanently damage your harddrives. If you have three or more HDs in your case I would recommend you get a case that was specifically designed for cool operations.
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Clock says that noise from your HD is not always a problem. I would not listen to him on that one. The noise like a dying fan from your HD is most definitely your problem. You should take a backup of that drive RIGHT AWAY if you do not have a lot of critical data on it. If you DO have a lot of critical data on it and it is costly data, shut down your computer and ship your drive to a specialist.
The dying fan noise of your drive means that the drive is having problems spinning the plates up, or that it is regularly spinning them down. It is an indication of a failing harddrive, and you are probably SOL. The next noise you will hear is probably a clicking noise as the drive is trying to position the reading heads and failing. Is this a Maxtor drive? Not at all an uncommon problem (and symptom) with those, particularly the consumer grade disks.
The reason I only recommend you backup your drive if you do NOT have vital data on it is that the backup it self might quite possibly damage the drive beyond any possible repair.
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For rendering, the three most important factores are CPU, CPU and CPU.
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[Greg noss] “the Opterons are 64 bit CPU’s. That is where you will get the biggest increase in performance from”
This is more of a myth than anything else. There is nothing inherent in 64 bit computing that makes it faster. In fact, there are a number of things that may make it slower. There isn’t much in a 64 bit architecture that will make Vegas or similar style of software faster. The 64 bit architecture allows for a far larger memory space etc, which isn’t really needed by most applications. Don’t expect 32bit to 64bit to have anything like the effect 16bit to 32 bit had.
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