ABS Awesome 5500 PC
 

I'm at the early stages of purchasing a new PC for Vegas for personal/recreational use. Anyone have experience with ABS and specifically the Awesome 5500?

So far I like what I see from ABS. All standard parts and decent prices.

Thanks.

You can check them out on resellerratings.com

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller1431.html

Their rating is kind of average, although much better than Dell's (~4.1/10).

Some people also like Monarch Computer.
They charge you street prices for parts plus a build fee ($50USD).
http://www.resellerratings.com/seller2079.html

The only thing bad I heard about Monarch is that they may take a little time to ship.

2- From basic configurations, you might want to add more hard drive space.

Don't get Creative sound cards... they're not very good for video editing. Something like a M-audio revolution will give you better quality sound. On-board sound is ok too if you aren't audio savvy.

Errors while printing to Tape
 

I needed to print a small 5 minute Vegas 5.0 project to MiniDV tape so I selected the footage on the timeline and clicked on Tools/Print video to DV Tape. I've done this numerous times with no problems but now, no matter what I do, I get the same error.

First try-the pre-render ran and then when it was just about done, I received the following message: "An Error occurred while creating the media file Error 0x8007001f (message missing)"

So I rebooted, and tried again with the same message. My next attempt was to render the project to a separate AVI using the Huffy Uv Codec. Then I took that .AVI and created a new project, selected the footage and tried the same thing with the same error message. I don't know what else to do. I have plenty of disk space available and a powerful machine using WinXP with 1.5 gb of memory. I'm stumped but I seem to recall something like this happening in the past but can't remember.

Glenn, thanks for the great info. The reselerratings.com web site is an excellent resource. I'll take a look at Monarch.

I agree with you on Creative sound cards. I'm planning on purchasing a M-Audio 5.1 or 7.1 card.

Anyone else have recommendations for a PC integrator?

Thanks.

Sorry but I feel stupid now and can't delete the post. The camera wasn't in a ready mode ... it was on but I had opened the tape door on my camera because the camera shuts off after a few minutes to save power. Opening the tape kept the camera on until ready for rendering.

I Simply needed to ensure the camera was completely ready even though I hadn't made it to the final prompt in the process.

Well, I could delete it for you BUT sometimes it's these kinds of things we need to hear periodically so that WE don't make the same mistake. Thanks for reporting the "fix".

Brightness & Contrast
 

I am a new user to Vegas 4.
I have a problem with my brightness & contrast. FX video window. I can not
get it to lighten up the video. (Clip) I have tried the split screen button. It use to work fine, Is there a lock that I have turned on?
Any suggestions.

For what it's worth, I have >two< Monarch computers, one of which is dedicated for editing. Yes, it can take longer than expected to receive a customized unit (3-4 weeks), but I think they really want to please and keep their customers.

What the...(print to tape)
 

It's the 11th hour, the montage is due at the reception, I go to print to tape from the timeline, and the output jumps up and down on the camcorder screen as well as on the tape.

Running Vegas 5 on a Dell Inspiron 8600/512Mb/5400rpm 40 GB HDD. I got messages about running out of disc space, so I plugged in the IOGear PCMCIA firewire card and attached an external drive (WD 120GB) and relocated the prerender file location to a folder on that drive with plenty of space. Print to tape worked OK, except there were three audio glitches (the volume drops noticably) and one audio/video glitch (picture disrupted and blue frames interspersed). I'm guessing those were times I inadvertently bumped the external drive.

So I capture the footage from the camcorder, patch in the correct audio over the glitches, patch in the correct photo over the video glitch, select the region, hit Print to Tape, and the same screen jittering happens. What I'm seeing is the blue screen with data display jittering up and down while Vegas is prerendering.

Could it be that the file locations are not allowed on the same drive i.e. the captured video now on the timeline, must not be located on the same drive as where the pre-render file is located?

Or?

I just did a Print to Tape from the laptop last week and everything was fine.

Also, now that I've used the PCMCIA firewire card, the laptop's built-in firewire port is not recognizing the camcorder...any thoughts?

That was a little too nerve wracking for one wedding. Would prefer not to repeat it.

thanks,
Scott

Hard to say exactly what is going on except that it sounds like the machine is not keeping up with the necessary data flow. You can specify any location for the various files as long as there is plenty of space.

Here's what I think I would try: Render the project to a single new AVI file. Now print just that one file. If it still won't to a PTT, try using the capture program to send it out. If that still doesn't work, try something like Scenalyzer Live.

If it's not the split screen button causing your problem, my next guess would be that you're changing a keyframe AFTER the current cursor position OR you have multiple keyframes and the keyframe you're changing is before the keyframe directly in front of the cursor postion. See if it might be a keyframe issue.

Capture bugs
 

Whenever I try to capture a tape with Vegas 5 1.0b, it keeps splitting it into 2 or 3 clips. I DID uncheck the scene detection so that is not the problem. It splits at random spots in the tape. I am capturing 24p DVX100 footage with a PV-852 (used as a deck). It's very annoying and I have never had this happen to me with Vegas 4. I'm running XP home with p4 2.4ghz and a gig of ram. 160 gigs of hard disk space with about 100 free.

Thanks for any help

Pretty Good IMO
 

David,
I'm on my second ABS system and have had little problems so far. Just make sure that when ordering that they put the OS on the drive you specify (they got that wrong on my newest PC).


I'm currently doing all my editing on a P4, 3 gig, 5500.

The price was nice also.

How large are the clips? What format is the drive? If you are capturing to a drive formatted for FAT32, you have a max file size limit of 4Gig.

You might want to check that the Maximum size for DV clip option is not checked under Options, Preferences, then the Disk Management tab.