Hello everyone, i have a very good audio recording setup here in my studio, but i am really getting sick and tired of bands running around my house and breaking things ... (lots more problems), so i went into video a few months ago. I have recieved a free copy of premiere and after effects from my school, a copy of acid from my friend for audio editing, and ive been working in those (for a month ), i have a p4 1.6 with 640mb of ram pc, a surround sound audio monitors, and about $1000 to spend, can anyone give me some advice on how i should set up?

(This setup will be for bringing film from the camera, editing, and afterwards getting it back onto a source)

Also the setup should be expandable, say i get another thousand, i would like to add upgrades that would be of great help.

hey, I do audio too. I've never had any problems with people breaking ****, usually they're pretty happy that I'm charging them minimally to record professionally, but anyway...

I say, get Vegas Video, the Zenote plugins, and Spice plugins. That's all I use for anything. It's got excellent color correction, grain effects if you'd like to try to fake film looking something, and lots of other good stuff. It's the only program I use with the exception of After Effects and some 3d programs for special effects once in a while. I know it's a personal thing what NLE's people like, but I cut my teeth on Vegas. It's very similar to ACID. The best thing about it is, you can download a fully functional trial for free from the website (it's sony.com, don't know where though.) I do audio on it, because I didn't like Sonar 3 Producer edition. I do video on it, because I didn't like Premiere or Avid. Vegas is the most stable thing in the world. Get it, try it out, be blown away.

It's got video capture, realtime preview, and it'll spit it back out to tape.

I did post (some color correction, contrast, etc) on a 25 minute short I did, on a friend's P3 700 MHZ pc running windows 98 SE. It was a bit slow, because the computer was old as hell, but it chugged through. Premiere couldn't even render the file with out crashing. AVID wouldn't even load.

If you're a student, look around online. you can get it for sub 300 dollars.

If you're going to be charging money/making a living for this, you can't use Academic versions or discounted versions of the programs you mentioned, although there really isn't a way to for anyone to find out for an individual as yourself.

But just so you know, the reason Academic/discounted versions are so cheap is because they assume you won't be making any money off the use of the program. If you are, then you have to buy the full retail version.

Acid isn't that good for editing audio for video. Soundforge does a better job of adding effects to the sound files, and the audio tracks in Premiere and Final Cut are enough to edit things together and cross-fade them.

Pro Tools would be the keen best to do it on. Man I love ProTools. But you need hardware along with the program, but I think the bare necessities of it you can get for a 1,000.

i would check out the avid xpress studio for a student discount of $1000

I would look at getting Avid Xpress DV, worth about US$695(about $4 cheaper that premier pro). it is the base level of a Avid, the industry platform for video editing (practically everybody, whos anybody uses avid for at least offline work).

As far as audio goes I personally prefer Cubase SX over ProTools for music work. However neither are cheap.

Let me refine this, i am a recording engineer (i have nuendo media for audio and i have some nice manley compressors and eqs for all my audio needs), i started with a 1500 budget an i have bought premiere 6.5 and an older version of after effects, what i just bought a new pc today so i have 600 dollars left over, so what i need are some ok a/d converters and anything else that would be of help. Thanks to everyone.

A good analog to digital converter is pyro a/v link. Its around $150

And by the way for software you should realy look into student discounts... you can save a lot....heres a good one http://www.academicsuperstore.com/