On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 17:29:57 GMT, Ryan R. Rosario wrote:

>I just purchased the Canopus DVRaptor and i am very impressed with the
>quality, but not at all impressed with Premiere. I created a short test
>video to see if Premiere or the card (whichever controls the rendering)
>would work. I must also say that Premiere ran very fast during this
>first try. The first time it worked beautifully via preview.
>
>A few hours later, I opened Premiere and it ran sluggishly slow with
>constant lock-ups. The major problem was that when I ran preview again,
>nothing happened. I then clicked the play button on playback monitor
>(because the preview was still stored) and my video played for 1/2
>second, then stopped. I then went into the preview files and deleted all
>of them and re-rendered the project. The preview still wouldn't
>work and caused Premiere to freeze and I could not access any of the
>menu bars.
>
>I was having similar problems with this using different capture cards,
>especially the dreaded Buz box. I have heard that the DVRaptor is one of
>the best cards on the market, so I am hoping that it is just another one
>of the many bugs in Premiere 5.1.
>
>My system is a 96MB Pentium IIMMX 400Mhz, dedicated Seagate SCSI 6GB
>Drive, Voodoo3 3000 video card, TBS Montego Bay sound.

Best guess: RAM shortage...
Were you running other programs in the background (not
a good idea, while exporting video!)? Did you reboot
before attempting to export (same thing - the computer
needs just about all available resources to export
successfully off the timeline [you are drawing info from
the program drive, and combining video and audio files
in real time from the preview folder and from one or more
other drives - not easy!])? I suggest a "clean" rendering
of the timeline part that you want to export, a saving of
the project, then a reboot of the computer, followed by
opening only Premiere (and export the video before doing
anything else). If this produces iffy results, try deleting
the preview files, defragging whatever drive they are on,
then re-rendering the previews (this is good practice,
anyway, especially with long projects...). Upping the RAM
to 128megs (or more) wouldn't hurt, also. BTW, if you add
another large video drive, you can make it a recent UDMA
type and save money (using the ["clean"...] 6-gig drive
for your preview files instead of the "C" drive would
also help - but if the "C" drive is defragged just before
the preview files are rendered, there is usually not
a problem using the "C" drive for preview files).
Since your system worked well the first time, other
problem causes (like incompatibility of the Raptor with
your video or other card) are unlikely.
The problem is unlikely to be caused by Premiere, if
it was sluggish on open (it can be sluggish with use with
insufficient RAM - just save the project, then close and
reopen it [maybe with a reboot for good measure...;-]).
It looks like a RAM problem to me...