fist, sorry Steve, been calling you Eric?? Don't know why, these alias' (pun again) bother me a little. I even invented 'bill the dill' in a sort of 70s protest, sort of street marching and banner waving.., completely dillusional.., oh well back to the psych..?

Avid Pro, I have that but let me say firstly that Avis WAS the industry standard here as it was everywhere. Many high level people here (most actually) still use it and personally I think it better. BUT thats probably because I cut my teeth on pinnacle, then premier and they are all similar. In thelong run, its not how big it is its how you use it. EVERY editing site is similar, its cut paste and colour correct..? Am i wrong? Maybe thats a bit simplified but..?

WHY the uni has turned to Macs I don't know, I feel they didn't get the proper advice or they saw the future and the future was Macs?? ( dare I say my humble opinion). example; They were thinking of starting animation (2 weeks ago) and were going to get 3D Max, I gave them a few names around town of they best animators and told them to get 'advice' before moving forward on that, considering it was for film and not for gaming. You know where I am heading with this so I will move on...

Anyway, it seems FCP is all the rage here now, not just the uni but many production houses are using it to the point where it is safe to say it is ahead in use than Avid, but like all 'facts' i should research this more before stating it in black and white.

Up until 4 years ago, the uni used Avid..?? So you figure it, its a mystery to me, maybe they got a good deal on Macs or as I said I suspect one of the 'shining star students' suggested it, this is what happened with the 3D Max story, and they swallowed it??,in again my humble opinion, a high powered salesmen, Larry Jordon, who projected all this amazing time saving features on FCP, the up shot is I came home and did all the exact same things in Premier 1.5. So I know what you mean be editing systems being similar, especially Avid and FCP, there's barely a difference (in my humble experience too) , they even have the same looking colour corrector windows, ect.

The trouble is It is huge and when I put it on )Avid) it looked incredible but I couldn't capture from the camera. So I took it off and am using premier again.

Is there something I need to know when capturing, I just used it like I did in premier, I got sound but no vision.., But I was using a single CCP camera, not 3 CCP or HD, this shouldn't make a difference, should it?? Can you suggest where I might be going wrong, maybe having both premier and AViD on the same system??

The rendering, yes I think there is something basically wrong the the system, but how to track it down, is there a bench mark software that will test the power supply, heating, etc. Would the INTERNET cause trouble?? You know, if an update for the virus software came in, would that stop it?

As far as CPUs, I seem to be be putting my foot deeper in it alll the time, I meant, or how I read it, was that Steve said the dual CPU (laptop) is using only 'one of its dual cores' and you can make it use both so the computer will use 100% of the CPU rather than 50% as was my dual core laptop, I hope this is starting o make sense?