I've been trying to play with the Vegas 8.0 Platinum demo, but the entire program keeps freezing while "Building peaks" after adding clips to my Project Media. This looks to have been a problem that was addressed in 7.0. I have an HV-30 on default settings that I was able to import clips with no problem, but as the background task goes along, that's when I get locked. I can't save anything and have to restart the process each time. My system has 2G of memory, 3Ghz Pent IV.

Kind of discouraging, but since I always read great things about the software, I guess I'm looking for any ideas or at least some encouragement.

You don't mention the file type you're importing?
If it's HDV, it won't open in the Demo version; the MPEG encoder/decoder is disabled in the demo.
More information might help pinpoint your problem?

I was trying to import HDV, so I'm guessing that's the problem. I'd rather they gave me a heads up instead of a hang, but it makes sense.

Yeah, you'd almost expect a popup screen or something that says "MPEG input/output is disabled in the trial" or something like that. Somewhat puzzling there is no notice.

Seems like a strange thing to do. Why they disable HDV? half the people out there are using HDV.

Because of the licensing involved. Most demo programs don't have the MPEG kernel enabled. It's very expensive.
If you're ever bored, take a walk through the MPEGLA website, and read about licensing costs. Very enlightening.

I think I may be confused. I uninstalled the Platinum demo and loaded up the Vegas Pro 8.0 demo and things were imported and peaks were built just fine. I put together a quick few minute video to just try things out and all went well (with the obvious limitation on the output formats available.) Is there a significant difference between the versions that this would have happened? I think it more likely that something was just screwy with my first install of Platinum 8.0... I'm not a pro user, so I'd prefer to step back to the Platinum edition.