It's not a good idea to use the system drive for your clips. The software will need to access the sectors on the system drive where drivers, OS and the application are stored and then jump to where the video is. Always better to separate the system drive from the clips drive.

While this may help, as you're dealing with AVCHD I doubt it will cure your problem.

Well, not exactly. This Firecoder card is for transcoding to and from AVCHD into mpeg2, and speeds up this process. It does not get used like the Matrox to render real-time previews during the editing process, which is the complaint which Chris has expressed.

To the extent that someone could first transcode AVCHD into mpeg2 using this card and THEN use a non-AVCHD editing approach which renders previews at a rate which is closer to real time, then this would be a solution, recognizing that the final, edited content would need to be again transcoded back into AVCHD if one were to want to author AVCHD disks.

The Matrox card is very specifically designed to speed up previews of certain specific filters and effects, and only does so with Adobe software, and does not support AVCHD. Perhaps Matrox will someday offer the same solution for AVCHD.

The preferred Edius workflow with AVCHD is as follows:
(1) Convert from AVCHD to Edius HQ for editing. A free, fast converter is available to do this. You will get smooth editing in HQ with a suitably fast pc and full preview to a monitor with one of the Edius cards.
(2) FireCoder Blu will speed up encoding back to AVCHD. At the moment it is stand alone, and said to be usable with a variety of NLEs. Eventually it will also work as an Edius plugin.

Thanks Larry, David for clarifying.
I'm also currently trying to optimise my, which software to use, which format to edit in etc (I have a low spec machine in video AVCHD terms)

just a quick update.
I made avi proxies 1280x720 from my 1920x1080 avchd files

Put them in separate folders and had vegas goto whichever folder i wanted to deal with.

Edited fine, and switched between the proxies fine.
exported proxy renders as tests, worked fine.

I goto export a 2min test file from the original avchd files,
and vegas crashes within seconds everytime.

Looking at my resource monitor everything is fine.

I made sure to change my project format from the 720 i was working in (proxies)
and changed the project back to a 1080 when i put the avchd files back in.

I had some moving text graphics which I first setup as 720, but switched those to
1080 as well.

Even though its stuttery when playing back the avchd version it doesnt seem to crash when im just previewing.

I guess the fun begins trying to figure this out.

Suggest you might download the Edius trial and see how you like it. When I tried it on my very fast quadcore, the conversion speed for AVCHD to the Edius format was horrendously slow, but apprently things are better now.

Larry

The Edius file conversion utility is now at v3. A user manual is available online here:
http://canopus.vo.llnwd.net/o2/unsec...oGuidev300.pdf