Right on, glad it was mechanical limitation and not software. Very nice, way to stay open and double check yourself. I've spent the last 6 years upgrading constantly (cheaply)for the sole purpose of being able to run the NLE as fast as possible, oh yeah, games too -tee hee. Every problem I have ever come across related to performance I have been able to t-shoot and solve..usually with faster parts LOL>....

In one of the other threads http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=67111 We talk about organizing footage, if you read some of my posts you'll see I go to great lengths to have my NLEs running smooth on all fronts. It might be overkill to some but there's nothing like having more time to experiment and produce and less time watching the "rendering" dialog box.

I'm not using any intermediate codec like cineform or anything like it. I'm capturing HDV footage from my FX1 with Premieres' own preset. I tried changing the quality to draft and then to automatic, but the problem persists. Then, instead of "fit to window" I changed the viewing window to 50%. No go! I tried to change the output to none on the playback settings, and also changed the external device settings. Nothing works. Do you guys think this might have to do with my pcs' virtual memory? Should I increase it? I know it's a long shot but I'm running out of options here. I'm also going to check and see if the DMA is enabled (it should be, according to adobes' tech support).

I think I might have found out what the problem is. I visited http://www.johnrofrano.com/hdv.htm and read that only one of the cores is used durring previews (which is weird because when premiere is loading a msg apears saying that a dual core has been detected). So, since I have a AMD 64 Dual core 3800+, only one core might not be enough. I don't know if there is a way to "force" my pc to use both cores durring preview?

Try setting priority to HIGH or REALTIME, see if that helps...

Yes, I was wondering about that, but whenever I was about to change it on the task manager a msg poped up saying that this could "change existence as I know it" or some other jibberish like that ;-) I'm gonna give it a go when I get home.

I don't have many tasks running in my editor OS, the ones I do have running I set the affinity for those to ONE processor. The for Premiere I set the tmp file and Adobe...exe to HIGH or sometimes REALTIME.

The tmp too? Do you know the name of the tmp process on the task manager? I'm gonna set it to High too. Btw, thanks for all the tips!

Darn, I'm at work, but it is like a letter and a few numbers then .tmp. It only comes up with premiere running.

No worries. As soon as I get home I'm going to try all this stuff. I have the feeling that today I'm finaly going to tame the beast ;-)

Darn it! I can't belive it. There's not a freaking way to make it work! Each core has 2.01 GHZ. Do you guys think if I increased it to at 3 GHZ it could solve my problem? Any ideas of how much would that cost? How about RAM? Should I bump it up form 2 gig to 4 gig?

Rafael:

I have virtually the same set up as you do- except for the video card. Now, you and I may have different standards as to what we want out of preview, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the video card may be the issue. I am running a PCI Express 256 megabyte memory card. It ran me arount $179.00 USD. The LE designation on your card tells me it has some concessions, in other words that it is a stripped down version, and I am guessing that is the problem. I preview footage all the time with Premiere Pro 2.0 and on my dual monitor set up, and I have a fine result. Again, this may be a difference in our standards, but I am not seeing jittery or skipping stuff at all.

You could try usings RivaTuner, overclock the card a bit and see if that helps. What I do with every video card is toss the stock HS&F, buy a bad @ss one as well as copper heatsinks for the memory. My current card is stock at 325MHz GPU and 600MHz Mem. With the added cooling I get 419MHz GPU and 845MHz Mem, the temp barely goes up. BF2 gets another 20FPS!!!!

Surprise surprise. I found out that SD footage is jittery too. There's something REALLY wrong with this picture and I don't know why. I have to pin point what it is because I can't afford right now to buy a new graphic card, 3 ghz of dual memory, 2 gig of aditional ram. I just bought a mic and a Brevis35 and that kind of blew my budget a little bit. I HAVE to pin point what's wrong so that I can buy ONLY what I need (even though I wouldn't mind at all doing a massive upgrade).

I think it all just boils down, utimately, to the OS. Just MHO

I had this problem before. I think this is the problem:
Uninstall the IDE channels in Device Manager, reboot. Solved it for me.