| User review:
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Hi all, well as a past extremely frustrated user of Studio 10.5 I believe I have finally cracked an installation configuration which actually works, notwithstanding the occasional freeze. I have a Pentium 4 3Ghz with XP installed on a 200GB Sata drive (My "C" drive), 2 x 320GB Sata drives configured as a striped array giving 640Gb capacity, called my "D" drive, and 2000MB (2GB)DDR2 memory which doesn't seem to have much to do with the performance at all. I have installed the Studio 10.7 update but cannot honestly say whether that has solved the myriad of extremely frustrating problems I had before, or whether my latest installation configuration was the reason.
This is what I did:
Installed XP on the 200Gb "C" drive. Installed Studio on the 640 GB striped array "D" drive. Everything started to work really nicely, while working on a large slideshow project of some 850 slides with menu's, transitions, music etc. Then I setup Studio to capture my video straight to the same "D" drive on which the program was installed. Well the manure hit the fan so to speak. DROPPED FRAMES abounded. I tried all sorts of things to no avail then switched the program to capture video to the same "C" drive that XP was installed on. Eureka! Not a single dropped frame. Smooth as silk. Note also that when using the program to build your DVD, I have found that turning off background rendering makes things much faster, but takes longer to create the finished project, but nowhere near the 9 hours claimed by other users. Once you have captured your video to the "C" drive you can then move the whole lot to your super fast drive (My "D" drive which reads and writes at over 100MB/sec in the striped configuration)then build your project from there. Let's face it, we all love this program (or would if we could get the darn thing working properly) and I am pleased to say that I have finally got the darn thing working properly. The interfaces and facilities of the program are infinitely better than anything anyone else has to offer - including Adobe Premier Elements, which runs very smoothly but isn't a patch on the ease of use of Studio. Also, depsite the whinging of many users about having to purchase extra effects etc, don't even bother. There are more than enough that come with the program (and the others you can access after registration) to create a fantastic, fun project that will have your audience spellbound if you apply a little creative effort. The next thing I am going to try is uninstalling the program from the "D" drive, re-installing it on my "C" drive, then setting up Studio to capture to the super fast "D" drive. This should help to find out whether the improvement in performance was related to the latest patch or whether it was the drive configuration which saved my sanity! Note that if you can setup the program to save all of its files in the same directory, including the project files (the .stx files) you won't have any problems if you move any of the components around. I think the .stx file is a reference of sorts to where all the bits are kept. Moving any of those bits is a pretty good way to bugger up your project. Incidentally, I have noticed that even when Studio still occasionally hangs, when I reload and continue working on the same project, nothing seems to have been lost. |
