Neophyte could use some advice

[Misha]

I recently acquired a Panasonic video camera with a built-in hard drive.  I then purchased a video editing package called Power Director, with which I have had some stumbling success. All of this is happening on a 20.8GHz PC with 1.43 GB of RAM.

Everything seems to take so confoundedly long.  Have I made a poor choice of software?  Is my PC hopelessly underpowered?

Any comments would be appreciated.

                                    Misha Lazer

[Dixiegirlz]

I'm sure some of the PC owners will chime in and give you some guidelines....personally I just duplicated the equipment that was in the URTV studios/ (i-Mac, FCE, PDX 10 camera...Bogen tripod, and then got some external hard drives to store on.  Simpletech is very reasonable (thanks, Terry for steering me to Simpletech )

[Alpha Arts]

Misha,

You didn't say where the time delay is.  Is it while you're dumping the images, editing, or rendering, or burning?

I'm not familiar with the package you chose.  I use Sony Vegas 8 Pro which is very powerful pro package for a lot less than Final Cut Pro (which is only on apple platform anyway).  If you have children in school, or you are attending college, you may be able to purchase Vegas or many other software packages for A LOT LESS at    AcademicSuperStore.com.

You computer should do ok with what you have.  It would be better to have dual cores and at least 2 gb of ram.

Just remember that dumping tapes or video into a computer is in real time.  (1 hour tape or video =  1 hour dump time)  Your camera  may allow folder dumps or clip file transfer at digital rates.  Much faster, but I'm not familiar with that camera.

Rendering can take 1 1/2 - 2 times the length of the video to render.

Then after editing, burning can take a long time also.  This is all normal.

Your computer drives can effect the speed.  They should be at least 7200 rpm.
 
How much crap your system loads on startup can make a big difference also.  If you see a number of programs like Norton,instant messenger, weatherbug, etc, etc, they are hogging your system's resources.  I try to stop as much as I can before running and using my editing software.

Then again, the package can be an elephant and slow as all get out.  I was using Pinnacle 9 and 10, and it was like FOREVER to get anything done.

You might check out a free download of Vegas from Sony and see if things speed up for you. 

All in all, video IS a slow process anyway.  Good luck!