In case anyone wondered where I've been for the last 4 weeks (doubtfull) I went shopping, bought the bits above, except the RAID disks and got a 128 graphics card instead of 256, and built up my system. I got one jumper in the wrong place on my ATA drive (somehow didn't order SATA!) which gave me windows loading problem, but a good friend sorted that out. Now I've taken an hour of event video imported it with Bills movie maker, used nearly all the transitions and am about to add sound! I'm really quite pleased with the system capability and processing times are reasonable. I practiced with 15mins of video and burned it to DVD, using standard DV-AVI format importing from DV camera and exporting/burning using NERO software but found some noise problems as flashing lights on the original video caused pixalation and loss of clarity on the DVD. This was not apparent on the captured video when played back from the PC so I re-burned the video using the High Quality setting in NERO, this used 1G but improved the image stability. I'm happy with that but it does mean I'm using more DVD space so won't get much more than an hour onto it.

So my friends from all that I have a couple of questions (of course!):

1) when my system comes out of standby my cpu temperature is raised to about 40degC. After a few minutes of running this drops to about 30C. The mobo stays about 42C. Are these temps ok or should the cpu be kept cooler in standby, is there a system bug?

2) am I employing the most lossless process for quality, DV-AVI in via firewire and out DV-AVI to DVD? Is there any system aspects to improve on?

3) can I get more on a DVD using other compression techniques when I'm using the high quality setting/burning?

4) when I get different editing s/w how will it work with a video created with Win Movie Maker? Will the fades and transitions be editable or would they be 'part' of the video and only able to be cut out rather than changed? (I may decide that using all Bills transistions wasn't such a good idea after all!)

It's been a longish journey but I love the ability of digital editing, although my 'analogue productions' so far seem to have been quicker, probably because there was less editing, because it weren't so flexible (and also I try to shoot with minimal editing in mind).

Next phases are to get my Hi8 imported, then the cines (what else to do on these long winter nights?)

Any other tips (not for the previous question), maybe what s/w to move up to?

Thanks to all who read and feedback.