[Wendy Lam]

Wow, thank you so much for all your input!
Getting your advice and expertise makes me feel much more comfortable with making a decision. OK, so an i7 with a NVIDIA graphics card!

John, thank you especially for your response to the interlacing question! Can I ask another one? On some videos I edit in Vegas, there are very short, fractions of a second, black-out skips in the video where the whole screen turns black and “skips a frame” and then resumes again. It happens in the preview AND after rendering. These are WMV files and the issue only occures in some WMV videos and not most other WMV videos. Do you know what could be the issue that’s causing this?

A separtate (WMV clips without the blackout problem) but similar problem also happens in audio too where a portion of the sound drops off. Sometimes several seconds passes where the audio is entirely muted before sound is restored. The sound is fine when I play it in a media player but is muted in Vegas.

Is this a format problem? Some people suggested I use AVI files for better quality. Maybe it’s my old computer but when I edit AVI files the preview mode is less smooth. The previews get very choppy and slow when I overlap several videos or set the video to play in reverse mode.

Any ideas or advice would be great!