what hardware do i need?

[vi0lentjuggal0]

whats the best amount of ram or whatever you need to be editing at ease? i've got 80gb with 10gb free 256ram. which is better vegas or premiere pro? my computer lags a lot when i'm editing in ulead video studio 8. what is the things you guys use to make your editing flow?

[thor300]

You need another harddrive, get a 250GB if you can, at least 160. Then double your RAM to 512. 1024MB would be noticeable better on some apps. For Ulead 8, then 512MB is enough.

[edDV]

whats the best amount of ram or whatever you need to be editing at ease? i've got 80gb with 10gb free 256ram. which is better vegas or premiere pro? my computer lags a lot when i'm editing in ulead video studio 8. what is the things you guys use to make your editing flow?

Back to basics.

What are you trying to edit? What formats?

What do you want to do with the edited material?
What are your quality expectations?

If you are attempting to edit compressed material, Vegas or Premiere may not be the best choice. They are intended for video production.

[vi0lentjuggal0]

i'm trying to make music videos, and other music artist type interviews, and eventually a dvd. i usually edit things as mpeg2 since there good quality. i bought some ram off tigerdirect.com but i guess it doesn't work with my computer i thought i would but nope, it was a gig too. i opened it and installed it once thats about it, what a waste.

vegas vs. premiere pro?

[edDV]

Neither if you want speed. They will convert MPeg2 to native project format (usually DV or uncompressed hardware based 4:2:2).

Mainconcept offers a $250 plug in to Premiere Pro to allow native MPeg2 editing for pros doing serious MPeg2 work.
http://www.mainconcept.com/mpeg_pro.shtml#standard

If you are doing original work, stay in DV or hardware 4:2:2 for production and after editing and special effects, encode to Mpeg2. If this is the case Vegas and Premiere Pro are both good and fast. Get the demos and see which you like.

My take is, for graphics intensity lean to Premiere, for medium level effects intensity and audio, go Vegas. For heavy effects, go Premiere + After Effects.

PS for RAM, 512MB is adequate. 1GB if you will be also running Photoshop or other RAM hungry apps. For disks you need one to many large (>120) capture drives on separate EIDE channels from OS. Be sure to set "scratch" aka "tmp" files to capture drive, not OS drive.

256MB RAM will work. A separate capture drive is your first priority.