Very slow performance with Premiere 6.5

[Persio]

I am trying to edit M2V clips using Premiere and it is painfully slow.
I am using a VAIO, Pentium 4, 1.4MHz, with 512MB of RAM, lots os disk space running Windows XP Professional.
Also, saving a 30-minute clip to AVI is taking over 6 Hours!!!
I must be doing something wrong. Please advise.

Thanks to all.

[mkelley]

Hmmmm -- right now I'm encoding in Premiere and can't check it, but are you saying you *brought* some .m2v clips into Premiere using import? I didn't think that was possible without a special plugin (they do sell a plugin expressly for this purpose).

Let's assume for a moment you have the plugin and have indeed imported MPEG into Premiere -- just what part of slow don't you understand? This would be a *very* slow process, to reverse code an MPEG video back into .AVI. It would take at least as long as the other direction (which even on my 2.4 1gig machine takes quite a while -- the encoding I'm doing right now will take two hours) and probably a lot longer, as it would have to interpolate frames rather than compress them. If you've done any effects (including transitions) this might well take six hours or more, depending on the length of the clips.

I guess we'd have to rule out the usual suspects if you think overall your machine is slow -- you *do* have a dedicated video drive, right? And it should be defragmented, and that should be where you're pointing your temporary swap/work space, and should have *plenty* of room (at least 30gig). And you shouldn't be doing too many other things while you're trying to export (make sure you've closed down any background processes, and if you have an antivirus you might try turning that off, although I run NAV all the time without slowdown). How fast can you encode to an MPEG using MainConcept (the defaults only)? It should be around an hour for each 30 minutes of video, if there are no effects or transitions (cuts only) for your machine. If it's taking appreciably longer then indeed you may have system problems.