Do I guess you run Vista?

What happens when you do just a small file like a one minute AVI output as WMV

Does it freeze while you are editing Titles? swapping timeline segments, what?

I have my Vista ACL set for Admin and it cured a lot of freezes, though is still happens especially when re-editing titles in larger 5 minute moves with multiple PIP.

I only have 1.5Gig ram and Vista with a 2gig cpu.
If you can't solve the problem - Change the problem

Ron, I am running XP.

Because PD7 would not import the .vob files, I had to find a program that would convert the .vob files losslessly (is that a word?). Simply changing the extension from .vob to .mpg was a suggested solution on another forum, but the audio was a mess. It works fine, now, though the converter cost $40USD, and it is an extra step in the process. Movavi Video Converter.

An instructor at my school suggested I needed a capture card to import the video files??

I'm just glad I can now edit but would like to know what has changed since I first used PD6 without issue. Maybe i has something to do with my camera settings? Who knows.

I had not tried this since upgrading from PD6 to PD7.
I took a commercial DVD made by Hollywood and copied one of the .vob files to my hard drive and renamed it as .mpg

Then i imported it into PD7 and edited the video track with no problems. I boosted the audio by raising the video track sound level and it plays flawlessly with no deterioration from the original DVD.

What does this tell me? PD7 is not guilty. Try exactly this scenario with any commercial DVD you have at home and edit a clip from any .vob track on any DVD.

I presume when you want to transfer filles from the camcorder to the pc you connected them using a USB connector and the camcorder looks like a disk drive, You then copied the DVD files,

A capture card (Firewire interface) is used to tranfer live video at video bandwidth rates from a camcorder in playback sending data over to the pc running an edit program like PD6/7 or MS MovieMaker which saves the data usually as AVI or MPEG So I doubt if having a capture card is necessary.

This leaves only the DVD files written to your camcoder disk as suspect.
The fact that you needed an additional converter tells me that the files your camcorder creates are not MPEG2-PS files. or at least not exactly to the MPEG2-PS specification codec.

Please try importing a store-bought DVD of your own and see if you agree.

By the way if you did buy the firewire card you could playback the file in the camcorder and send the video signal over the firewire to PD7 and let PD7 capture the video to your pc. This ignores the DVD feature in your camera and would prove if the video out from the camera is capable of being captured. The video out must be used with a firewire connection since USB does not have the bandwidth to handle video.

If you can't solve the problem - Change the problem