I am using a Canon HG-20 camcorder for video editing. It is a 60 gig hard drive, and shoots at a screen res of 1920 X 1080. The highest quality is 24Mps.
I use Corel Video Studio Pro X2. When exporting the video it saves at a frame rate of 29.97 I did a 45 second commercial with background music, a voice over, and a few titles. 3 Times in the video it did a lag and skip a frame. Its not a huge one, but its noticeable.
My computer has a Intel Quad core 2.83 mhz, 500 gig hard drive, expensive video card, 4 gigs of DDR2 1200 memory, Windows XP 32 bit. So it's a very decent video editing computer and I did disk clean up and defrag and there is very very little content on the hard drive, still new.
What can be done to get rid of the lagging? Oh and the software can't do a pre-render. It renders on export to video file.
When dealing with large video files, it is recommended that the hard drive is formatted with NTFS and use 64kb clusters instead of the default 4kb clusters.
I use that type of hard drive format on my mediapc. This quote below is from sagetv forums concerning hard drive format.
"64k is very important, whichever client that you use is not the issue; what is that Sage TV dumps large pieces of data to the drive and if it is not in 64k, it will not buffer correctly and video will stutter...."
Also it's recommended for best performance that you have one drive dedicated only for video. On my mediapc I have a bootdrive and 3 video storage drives. If I convert or edit, I always edit from source to save to drive.
Unfortunately it can only be done when the drive is newly formatted. But if your hard drive only has one large partition, then it wouldn't work for you. It's always best for windows to use the default 4kb clusters.
If you had 2 partitions, you can leave windows on the 4kb partition, and use 64kb on the data (video) partition.
But something else that could be causing the problem might be the software. That might be something to look at. Your hardware seems to be fast enough to get the job done.
You can also try exporting to an external drive usb2.0 is fast enough to handle video files. That way you source and to save files will be on different drives.
