Here is some background info: I have a pinnacle dv500 capture card and use Adobe premiere 6.0 to edit. Currently, I have a 45 minute film as a premiere project on my computer. In the past, I have not been able to export anything from premiere to my vcr. So what Ive done in the past is export an avi from premiere and then play the avi in pinnalce studio 7 and record it to my vcr. I have had no problems with this method up until now. My ram is 512, my hard drive is 100Gb (but its nearly used up...I believe I have 7 Gb free),my processor is Intel, 2.26 Ghz, and i have 2 sound cards (one is sound blaster, and the other is for digital music recording...EWS)

However, this time I have not been able to get a perfect avi out of Premiere. Ive managed to get one near perfect (1 or 2 significant glitches) avi out of premiere. Initially premiere would just crash and crash and crash.

Additionally, when i tried to play this near perfect avi in pinnacle and record it to my vcr, i experienced some more problems.
First, when I play the avi in pinnacle, 19 times out of 20 the audio drops out permanently after the movie plays for maybe 5 seconds. Second, when the audio doesnt drop, there are at least 2 places in the film where the audio is not in sync with the video. Does anybody have any suggestions or ideas? The pinnacle program i use is studio 7

It could be that both applications aren't liking the way in which you're compressing your video. What codec are you using in your AVI?

If you're worried about any loss of quality, I'd recommend you encode using the DV codec in the first instance. Assuming your original source material was in DV format, you *should* achieve a lossless conversion.

Additionally, disks do perform at their best when regularly "cleaned". You may want to consider tidying up your disk, freeing up some freespace by deleting unwanted files and defragmenting your drive. You should notice an increase in seek times after this clean up. This may help reduce glitches in the encoding process where large volumes of data are procesed by the disk.

If this doesn't help, you may want to write to a more compressed format such as DivX or Xvid. You shouldn't really notice any drop in quality, but will notice a significant drop in file size. These codecs will also put less strain on the CPU and may also help to smooth out your video.

Hope this is a start.

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Thanks for the suggestions. The source footage is dv and it was my understanding that the avi I exported from Premiere was entirely uncompressed...I experimented a bit with compression with little satisfaction-I'll give it several more attempts.

Ive got a friend who uses the same set-up as me (premiere 6.0 software, pinnacle dv500 hardware) and he swears that his pinnacle card "does more work" than mine. For example, when exporting, he has more options available to him, supposedly introduced by the presence of the card. Does anyone know anything about this? Is my card somewhat defective?