Hi - I'm really hoping someone can give me some helpful advice to help me improve my PCs spec's for capturing and basic editing:

I'm using Adobe Premiere 6 but it doesn't seem very happy/stable on my pc:

For example if I capture an AVI and try to select the clip from the bin Adobe will crash. I've had similar problems when trying to render preview's of sample movies (and I mean sample!)

I'm wondering where the best return on investment is if I upgrade - I'm not interested in huge projects I'd just like to capture my footage and tidy it up for eventual publishing (maybe VCD/DVD but haven't got this far yet)

I was thinking of possibly changing my motherboard as a friend has similar stability problems with the same board - other than that what about extra memory or a faster processor?

and naturally I don't have a lot of money to spend so any advice is welcome. :

Thanks in advance for your help,
Colin

Equipment/Specs:
Asus A7A266 motherboard (I think this is running at ATA100)
AMD Athlon XP 1400+
256mb DDR Ram
40gb 7,200 rpm Maxtor harddrive
Firewire card
Dazzle Hollywood bridge for analogue to DV
Sony Hi8 camcorder
Adobe Premiere 6 under Windows XP professional
(Having looked at this it looks a bit lame in processing terms but I guess you pay your money and you take your choice...!)

PS stupid to forget but:

The Maxtor drive is for capturing - my OS / Programs are on a separate physical drive...

I tried closing down everything I could that was running (antivirus, firewall etc) just in case it made enough resources available to Premiere...

Hi CJB,

an idea of your budget would be handy but I would say 256Mb of ram is way too little, you need at least 512 and 1gig would be even better. Having said that not enough RAM wouldnt necesarily cause premier to crash-just make it chug.

If you just wanna do basic editing why not try a less beefy edit package. Try using windows moviemaker (as a test) which is included with XP, if its still crashing youll know for sure that youve got a hardware problem.

I'm not up on analogue to DV, perhaps your problem lies there. Also ensure your capture and system discs have been fragmented and are set to use DMA.

good luck

Tonga

Thanks for the advice,

My budget - well its not fixed but its based on how much I think I should spend to do the job correctly versus the other things I know I have to spend money on like decorating the house!

I'll try Windows Movie Maker and see if things are any more stable - I also have MGI Videowave which also has problems so perhaps it is a hardware problem.

As for the memory I'll try it at 512; thats a reasonably cheap upgrade and won't be wasted money in any case.

My capture drive is definitely defragged - as I'm emptying it and the recycle bin before each capture attempt.

The analogue to DV part shouldn't cause any problems as I'm using the Dazzle Hollywood Bridge which is converting to DV so there's no drain on my PC in that respect. (Unless Adobe is confused as the device controls don't work - and it won't register the source unless device control is selected).

I'm tempted to buy a new motherboard in preparation for upgrading my processor to maybe a 2ghz / 2.6ghz processor.