When the 64 bit version comes out should i run XP or Vista. I hate Vista, but will run it if only option. Also, with the new "mixing board" view in V8 what set up would I need to run a 3rd monitor only for the mixing console?

After 3 months of research and a near miss with switching to FCP and Mac, our studio is going to stay with Vegas and I want the most powerful set up humanly possible (since its not my money)

Thanks

I would suggest Vista ( just disable all the theme's to make the most use out of what you've got under the hood ) because XP64 will not be getting any further development, and really Vista is the stepping stone to the next Version of Windows which will probably have a lot more 64 bit everything and will be more geared towards that (most likely), anyway, get a machine that is capable of running at least 8 GB of RAM even though you really don't need to, and 6 is probably all the more you'd need for doing most anything. You can tweak vegas to use more than 1024 MB of RAM for RAM Previews etc... if you want to go into the hidden options control in Vegas.

To run a 3rd monitor you'd either need to get your hands on a triple head graphics card ( don't really know of any ) or you'd need to run a second graphics card that's not operating in an SLI or Crossfire type of connection, and in fact your secondary graphics card could probably be quite lowly as you would have any GPU accelerated plug-ins such as Magic Bullet, operating off of the primary graphics card.

thanks...what about the quad 6600 vs. 6700...? Dont know if thats apples and oranges or nice speed difference. Want to run 2 edit screens and a the JVC HD display for preview without the through camera set up. Do i need to get the blackmagic card in association with vid cards? My goal is 3 edit screens and one HD display...possible?

well, it depends on how comfortable you are with overclocking. I did a bit of reading and I bought a Q6600 and OC'd to 2.8 Ghz with my Stock cooling fan w/o any problems and with temps in a very safe range even after 10 hours of full load processing with prime 95. (every proc. is different so you may be able to better or worse, and if you get an after market cooling fan you most certainly should be able to do better).

What you need to be able to understand is that no matter what proc you're using when you add FX (unless you convert your long gop HDV to something like the cineform NEO codec) you're not going to retain full framerate playback even though it will be real time (there's a difference).

My Q6600 runs pretty well, though I can't stress enough that you want to do 2 things when you're getting a Video Editor.

Run a separate HDD or Array of HDD's for each major component of your video. This means set up your computer so your computer has an isolated HDD for you OS ( running a 10K Raptor Drive here can make a very nice overall System improvement), a HDD or an array of drives in a raid for your Source footage / Capturing (Extremists might even run a separate drive for each couple of streams that have to play simultaneously, say 2 or 3 streams to a drive), and a HDD for your destination file (these can often be lower bandwith drives unless your pushing out uncompressed footage or something where sustained data rate is important).

Dave