The Matrox Parhelia has a full calibration routine for NTSC and output is extremely hiqh quality.

I have hooked up an M-Audio Sonica USB device. It was a pain
to get it installed but works flawless now! I haven't tried the
5.1 mode though since my receiver is not at my present location.

M-Audio makes some very nice products.

Just wanted to make a quick MPG1 out of a 3 minute montage I did. Procoder is like 5x faster than Vegas's MPG encoder.

It might be fast and it certainly is a better encoder in my
opinion, but it seems to put problems in your path. Try making
a short mpeg with Vegas first and see if you have the same
problems there. It might well be that procoder isn't able to
use input pixel aspects other then 1.0 (I don't if that is the case)
or there is something else going wrong. Using an original
vegas encoded file you might be able to better narrow it down!

My primary laptop screen is doing 1400x1050 (LCD). I have a
CRT monitor hooked up to my laptop that is doing 1024x768,
very handy to have the scopes on there and other things.

I never want anything lower then 1400x1050 for my primary
screen again, ever.

Most laptops I've seen only have 1 firewire port. But that usually
isn't that much of a problem since the firewire drives have two.

I'm doing all editing etc. on a DELL Latitude laptop running WinXp.
My Lady X episode was done on that. Worked like a charm. I'm
running a 160 GB Maxtor firewire drive with it though.

Well it's not technically a "problem" per-say. Actually displaying in the correct aspect (not making the subject look fat) is a good thing. It's just the fact that all my previous mpgs didn't display this way (ones which source footage I edited in Premiere). All my older footage that was edited in Premiere (the ones whos MPG1 encodings came out looking slightly stretched) always looked perfect when output as MPG2 to the TV. So if you understand my thought process- if the MPG1s that looked stretched on the computer monitor came out perfect on the TV, will the MPG1s that look perfect on the computer monitor come out stretched on the TV? *follow me* hehe. That was what I was trying to explain.

I'm just vocalizing a concern. When it comes to paid gigs I turn into a worry-wort anytime something happens that I don't understand.
Thanks for the input Rob.

Yeah when you get spoiled by high resolutions it's hard to go back. Everything seems so HUGE and cluttered.

I gave a demo through a data projector recently and had to reduce display to 800 x 600.

It was horrible - claustrophobic - it felt like Alice in Wonderland - everything was different!

Glen,

The best way to find out is to try it. In my experience everything has looked correct on the TV no matter what I do in Vegas. Straight PTT, preview, or going to DVD all shows correctly. Similarly whenever I have rendered to WMV or MOV they also show correctly. Maybe Vegas is simply properly setting a flag so the media play displays correctly.

So can we see the highlight anywhere then?

It depends on what you are doing and the speed of your processor
mostly. Color correction is in expensive effect in terms of CPU
usage and is also depedend on the type of footage you are
correcting.

If you do NOTHING to your footage Vegas can just pump the
DV stream out through firewire. As SOON as you add a
transition or filter it must do the following:

1. decompress the DV frame
2. apply whatever effects you have running
3. compress the frame into DV again
4. send it out over firewire

So in this case it must do 3 extra steps which are quite
CPU expensive.

Why I usually do is the following. I'm working on frames when
color correcting. If a frame looks good I check a couple of other
frames in the shot which usually turn out fine as well. I can
keyframe the effect at certains major frames in the shot to get
it working basically.

Then when I'm doing correcting a sequence or that particular
scene I render out a DV file of that and then have that playback
(which is then again in realtime) over the firewire to my TV.

This work flow works quite okay for me because I don't need to
see realtime moving images with color correction when I'm
setting the filters up. I can check a couple of still frames. Then
when I'm done I can view the whole shot/sequence and look
at it in the bigger picture.

One advantage is that this takes me away from my computer
and actually has me really looking at the footage as a whole
as well.

Additional Memory
 

I currently have a P4 2.4 GHz system with 512KB RAM. I'm considering increasing the RAM to 1GB. Anyone have any firsthand experience with respect to overall Vegas performance when increasing RAM? Am I likely to notice any improvement or would my $$$ be better spent elsewhere? tia

You will not see much difference UNLESS:

1) You are running multiple instances of Vegas or

2) You need a longer amount of time for RAM Previews


What are you trying to speed up? Rendering? Playing from the timeline? Something else?