Hi again d8newbie,

I'm glad you found and are able to use the 3D hardware acceleration. Before I found and enabled mine the standard wipes/fades worked OK but my 3D transitions did show up but were very jerky - 3D acceleration smoothed these out.

I am able to work on an entire hour at once. This is where more memory may help. Studio8 specs say 128MB minimum with 256MB minimum recommended which you meet, however, more memory certainly could help depending on what else is running in the background on your PC. I have 768MB. I used to think audio files were big until I started working with video files. If your PC is having to write to the Windows swap (virtual memory) file often - if your hard disk is being accessed constantly while you work this would definitely slow you down. I would install as much memory as your system allows/you can afford - taking into account how long you plan on keeping this PC.

As far as the blank transitions, see if this still happens with the background rendering and 3D acceleration enabled. Did breaking the files into smaller bites help this problem before enabling these?

Other things that I've read about but not tried and might help incrementally are telling Windows to put the swap file on its own drive or partition, and/or specifying that Studio8 use its own drive or partition for its working and temp files.

Welcome to the world of video editing, I've really enjoyed learning to do it similarly to what I'd learned to be able to do with still images.

Good luck - Keep looking around at the other forums such as the computer DV one, or the buying & general, some of the miniDV ones may also have items of general interest that could apply to D8 as well. I've learned a lot from the various forums/threads/posts on these sites - a lot of friendly and knowledgeable people visit them.

cwhiddon ---