Troubleshooting and Future Plans

Could MSP6 work on the 450?
This was a question that bugged me. Video Studio had run satisfactorily on the 450. Was there any way of tuning it up to get MSP6 to be usable? One of the advantages of coordinating the Desktop Video Interest Group in my city (Perth, Western Australia) is that there’s other people to bounce your thinking off. My PC vendor was one of the two presenters at the most recent meeting. While at his shop beforehand, we ran a tuning check through the system. For some reason, DMA was unchecked on one drive (system, not video). Set DMA to “on” – but made only a small difference.

Then we looked up the swap file (Virtual Memory). On my systems, I set up a fixed swap file (sometimes I set up a dedicated partition). In this case, it was set for the original 64M RAM. When we exchanged the 64 for a 128, I forgot to change the swap file. After I fixed that, performance is somewhat better. I think I could have, with some frustration, completed the project on the 450. However, funny things were happening with this track setup. Like rendered previews which had the video freeze after the cut to the VA track, or when played out on the Firewire link, ran and about half speed. If the preview was stopped, then restarted at this point, it ran smoothly. It just baulked at the cut between tracks – if a transition was put in, the rendered version would run sometimes correctly, sometimes slowly – with the camcorder on or off.

After that, I got to work on the disk drives. Cleaned out all video and project files not used in the current project. I then defragged all drives, and changed the preview and temp files location off the main video drive (to minimise further fragmentation of that drive).

As a result, the system became quite usable. For the most part the 1394 preview worked, and scrubbing to 1394 worked very nicely. There was a remaining glitch in the 1394 preview, but it is after all a beta patch, not final release.

Moral of the story: Clean up your system before doing reviews! Mud all over your intrepid reviewer’s face!

Dual-boot and Win2k
As I write, the rig is about to be stripped out, the Pyro transferred to another Celeron 300A running 450 (on a PC Chips all on board mobo – amazing that it clocks) and a Studio.DV card installed in the i810 mobo. Because the Studio.DV cannot coexist with MSP6 (the clash of CODECs), a dual-boot setup is planned, with Studio s/w, Premiere and similar s/w on the Win98SE boot, and MSP6 and Video Studio on the Win2k boot. With a fresh installation, newly formatted NSFS partitions, and a different OS, watch for the next exciting installment.

Next: Platform/Conclusions

Introduction
Install and See
Video Editor
Installation
MSP6 with the Raptor