Bit long, but need help

habed · #1 (**permalink**) 02-09-2005, 02:26 PM

Hi ya'll!! First of all, excuse my english, I'm joinning from Mexico.

Ok, this is the deal: I have a Sony Vaio Laptop, P4 2.4, 512 MB, 40GB internal HDD, 250 external HDD, ATI Mobile 7500C video card.

I got Screenblast Movie Studio 2 years ago, it was great, I learned to edit videos and even started a personal bussiness (not planned until I found I liked and other people liked what I do)

Using Windows XP you know you must be upgrading all the time, patches, security issues, etc. And sometime last year, on the sudden, my SMS started to work funny. looks like it's hard for it to keep up, video freezes while sound keeps going, specially in transitions, in fact, I can't see transitions the way they are supposed to look until I render the video.

Rendering takes 3 or 4 times the time it used to, so for a 22 minutes movie, it takes about 8 hours.

I also have Movieshaker which has a couple of nice special FX, so I used to cut the movie in small clips, render them in MPEG2, import them to MovieShaker, add the effects, render that again to MPEG2 and then import all the clips to Movie Studio and stich them. It used to look fine, but now the finel product looks all washed out, no definition, it's just imposible to know who's the person in the stills.

in othe forum somebody told my I should stick to AVI until rendering the final product, it's that right?

But, back to the mail problem, I do not have viruses, DMA is active, I have space in my HDDs, 512 RAM. Recently upgraded to Screenblast Vegas Movie Studio 4, but same problems.

Also, capturing from my camcorder got aweful, almost 60% of dropped frames, using MovieStudio, Adobe Premiere, MovieShaker and another program I have and can't recall it's name. I used Windows Movie maker and it got it just right.

I also erased my HDDs, re formated them, reinstalled everything, but nothing happens.

What can be the problem? Hardware? RAM DIMM damage? Processor? XP SP2? The computer seems to work perfect for everything else.

Thanks in advance, I hope I can get help here.

Marc Peters · #2 (**permalink**) 02-09-2005, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by habed

in othe forum somebody told my I should stick to AVI until rendering the final product, it's that right?

Yes. Kinda. "AVI" is too much of a generic wording to mean anything. What they meant to say was something like, "editing in DV AVI is the way to go in order to achieve frame accurate editing".

Sounds like you've had the PC a while. In that time have you ever "cleaned" your disks - i.e defragged and deleted all the crap you don't need includiing registry entries and software?

habed · #3 (**permalink**) 02-10-2005, 03:56 PM

Sounds like you've had the PC a while. In that time have you ever "cleaned" your disks - i.e defragged and deleted all the crap you don't need includiing registry entries and software?[/quote]

I've had the computer for 2 years now and always clean my HDD, defrag and everything, I'm very methodic on those things and had reformated all of them 3 times since the problems started.

Pieguy · #4 (**permalink**) 02-10-2005, 06:43 PM

SP2 is known to screw it up quite a bit...