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I have used this program for about two months. I really like it for editing and cutting clips except for the very choppy preview playback. I am not using HD footage, but I am using PAL. I have VideoStudio 11.

Here are the properties of one of my clips from my source material, all of which is stored on an external flash drive:

File format: PAL DVD
File size: 1,048,574 KB
Duration: 1696,480 seconds

video
video type: MPEG-2 Video, Upper field First
Total frames: 42,412 frames
attributes: 24 bits, 720x576, 4:3
frame rate: 25,000 frames/sec
data rate: variable vit rate (Max. 8000kbps>

audio
Audio type: Dolby digital audio
total samples: 81,431,040
attributes: 48000 Hz
layer: none
bit rate: 192 kbps

I am not using the audio on the clips, which are all muted or split off, but using music files. Currently, the clips I have dropped into the timeline that will not play properly have only one transition and no other effects have been added. The video stalls, stutters and freezes while the music continues to play. At times, the entire thing freezes.

I would appreciate any help, and if I can supply more information, I would be very happy to do so. Thank you.

There may be some corruption in your MPEG files, or it could be a compatibility problem with the particular MPEG file.

Where did these files come from? Is it possible for you to re-capture to a different format? If so, AVI/DV is generally the best format for editing, and the best format to start with if you are going to convert to another format. (DV is 13GB per hour and it might not fit onto your flash drive.)

What final-format do you want? Are you making a DVD?

When I had trouble editing MPEGs a few years ago, my solution was to buy the Womble MPEG editor. But that was with Video Studio 8, and I thought that most of the MPEG issues had been solved. But, I still use Womble for MPEG editing. (I use the Corel/Ulead programs for other things, including DVD authoring/burning).

A couple of other things you can try -

- Both Womble and VideoReDo have MPEG repair tools that can sometimes help. (And, both offer free trials, so it won't cost you anything to experiment.)

- You can try loading the MPEG file in Video Studio and then saving it as an AVI/DV file (before any editing). Then you can open the new file and edit it in that format. When you're done, you can re-compress the file to your desired final-format as the last step.

- You can try "repairing" the file by re-encoding it with SUPER (FREE!!!).

Of course, it's generally best to avoid re-encoding files that are encoded in a lossy fromat (i.e. MPEG-2). But, sometimes you have no choice...

Thank you for all the suggestions and possible fixes. I shall definitely look into this further. The DVDs that I am using are from my personal collection, so I can get to my source material at any time if I need to use avi files instead of mpeg. I do have another external if I need more space for larger video files.

I appreciate all of your help. I see I have more work ahead of me to get this resolved.

It may just be that your PC is not able to keep pace using the Flash drive. If you have enough space on an internal harddrive, try copying the source video files to it.

I use an external USB drive, and sometimes it tends to slow things down. So to work on a video, I will copy the file to an internal drive, then when I'm done with my project, I can delete the file(s) from my internal drive.

Oh, good idea. Thanks. I'll definitely experiment with that. I'm also reading about types of files and I do see that mpeg is not the best to use. I'm going to convert some vob files to avis and see if that helps.

Here is a little experiment for you.

1. How much space is on your external flash drive?
Let us say you have 1GB.

2. Now grab any file or a bunch of files that add up to around about 1GB and copy them to the flash drive. Time it with a watch and note how many seconds it takes for those files to copy across.

3. Now do the same thing to another internal hard drive.
If you only have 1 internal hard drive, use a temporary directory.

After completing this little experiment I think you will be able to answer your own problem.