SawStudio At Last

[Jon R]

To make a long story short...I purchased SawStudio during the pre-release, but do to a conflict between my soundcard (Aark 20/20+) and the OS upgrade (Win2k, which I have never used) I am still running SawPro in Win98. It works great for the multitrack commercial production I do. But it's time to make the move. I have solved the soundcard driver issue and have WinXP pro ready to go. I now need suggestions on upgrading my system and a new video capture card. I am running a Pentium III 650 with 512M of ram. What should that be upgraded to to run SS with no doubts and handle video playback at the same time. Ok, so that wasn't short. I have been out of touch for a long time. Help me see the light.

[Bob L]

Jon,

I would recommend using firewire with your XP and forget about a video capture specialty card. Use a simple Pyro Basic or Adaptec Firewire adaptor (about $49) and then if you have a camcorder with firewire... great way to transfer data directly into SAWStudio's video track.

If you need to transfer analog video, use a box like the Canipus ADVC-100 or 200... it translates analog to firewire.

Your machine should be fine to get things going, but to reach the low latency possibilities of the current SAWStudio, you will want to get into a 2.8ghz or higher cpu and a Pentium 4 architecture.

7200 rpm drives, either UIDE or Serial ATA drives seem to be working well these days.

Make sure you come up to the current updates, if you are back in the pre-release days... there were 2 payed updates along the way, but the enhancements are huge.

Good Luck,

Bob L

[Jon R]

Thanks, Bob. That tells me I'm not too far off. And you were right. I do want to be able to grab analog video from external sources occasionaly.

I work in concert with a video production company and do a lot of post work. The video guy is using Video Toaster 3 and drops me AVI files over a network. I am assuming that this will work even sweeter in SS than in SawPro with the AVI Viewer.

[Bob L]

Yes, the vidoe track and DV avi files will offer you a lot of benefits over the old SAWPro AVI viewer.

The engine is very smooth, and with a Matrox or ATI video card you will easily be able to output to an external video monitor using the Render to Overlay mode.

You can also render the audio mix back into the video right from the MT which can aid in producing finished spots, or at least dubs for the client to take home as the project is progressing.

Bob L