XL-1, DV200, Premiere 5.1 on Windows 98 HELP PLEASE!!!

For more than two years I have been fighting this thing and I'm about ready to throw in the towel. I've got 160 megs ram, I've got a 40 Gig dedicated 7200 drive and a Pentium II 300. My Premiere version is 5.1C. I simply can not get the thing to work for more than a few minutes before it crashes my system, or reboots it. When it does run for those few minutes it won't capture worth a damn (dropped frames by the dozen) and when I try to render anything - even something as short as 20 seconds with one cut and a transition, it comes out all jerky and spastic. Does anyone have any suggestions I can try? Is Premiere 6 more robust?

[Ken Tanaka]

I feel your pain. But this will be nearly impossible for anyone to remotely diagnose. Video capture and editing requires many elements of the system's hardware and software to be configured just so. Windows PC's, particularly older machines, were never really designed for the kind of processing and throughput that the task demands. Adding to the trouble are the many little drivers and settings that get installed with other software and that could conceivably foul things up.

I would say that the principal issues may have little to do with Premiere and I would not necessarily recommend that you upgrade to 6 in hopes of fixing your troubles. Off-hand I would focus on the following.

(1) Your memory (160 Mb) is quite low for this job, particularly if you have other apps running in the background.

(2) A key suspect in capture crashes is your capture hardware. What are you using?

(3) I'm not sure that your Pentium II 300 and its older chipset is up to the task at all.

From your extremely brief and clearly frustrated description here are the choices I'd see.

1. "Throw in the towel.", using your words. If you're not ready or willing to replace your system to accommodate this activity, and if video editing is really more of a whim than a necessity for you table it for sometime in the future and temporarily withdraw from your "two year" campaign.

2. Get a new PC. Dell, Gateway, Compaq, et.al. are hot on the trail of video and even the low-ish midrange Windows XP systems are up to the task of video editing. They all still require a bit of futzing to streamline but their architectures and hardware are remarkably more capable of handling video today than they were when your PII was built.

3. Leave your existing PC in place, continue using it for whatever else you use it for, and get an iMac for video editing. Aside from being striking-looking they are truly built for plug and play video editing. Firewire is built-in to each box and Mac OS ships with the iMovie application free. iMovie is a very capable video editing system and, after two years in PC Afghanistan, I can guarantee that you'll be having a ball within an hour of plugging your new Mac into the wall socket.

But I really would not recommend spending more agony and dollars upgrading and tweaking your existing PII300 box to turn it into a non-linear editing system.

Just my thoughts and opinions. Sincerely, good luck with your endeavors.

[Adrian Douglas]

Clinton,

I had no end of problems with my DV500 running on Win98. Same things as you're experiencing. I changed to Windows 2000 and things got much better.

Pinnacle capture cards can be quite difficult to set up, but once you get it sorted they work well.

Try these things:

download the latest driver
download the PPE program
check to see if yoúr motherboard is supported. mine wasn't and when I changed it everything fell into place.

you can do all of this at the pinnacle site
www.pinnaclesys.com