Underwater web cam question

[fire18fighter]

Hi everyone,

I have a question about a webcam I converted for use underwater.

I have an HP C615 I created an underwater housing for using a pelican case. I record my kids swimming to look at their technique. I use VLC to capture with it at 16:9 and 30.00fps as the settings. For awhile it worked really neat. Lately though it lags something fierce with a swimmer in frame. Oddly if I have it out of the water and have my kids run around in front of the camera, as long as it's set to 30.00fps it's totally fine. But as soon as I put it in the pool and they get swimming, it freezes every couple seconds (while still recording) before coming back to life and repeating the vicious cycle. Any ideas why?

I have tried using Windows Movie Maker and, while it works, the quality is just yucky. VLC can give me great quality... when it works. But I seem to have broken something.

Any help would be great! They have a training session tomorrow morning I would love to use this at (or try something new at) if anyone has a suggestion.

Thanks!

[turk690]

Is that an HP? Entering that model no. brings up Logitech. What kind of computer is it connected to? Why are you using VLC? What is wrong with the capture program that came with it?

[fire18fighter]

My mistake; it is a Logitech camera - the laptop I'm using it on is a Windows 8 HP laptop I got earlier this year.

The only capturing the software it came with seems to do is the same low quality as Windows Movie Maker. I used VLC because it captures (when it works) much higher quality. In fact the VLC videos come out in the gigabytes (the HD is 1TB so that's ok with me) whereas Windows gives me grainy stuff in like the teens of MB.

[turk690]

The webcam specs says the capture program that came with it allows full 1080p HD capture. Have you looked at it closely enough? There may be settings there that you can deliberately set to make it capture in full HD. We won't know much also until you post here the details of the files via mediainfo the webcam captured as is. In a similar post earlier I said windoze movie maker deliberately dumbs any and all valid HD files it can recognize to SD if you convert it to any other file (such as *.wmv) or make a DVD out of them. There may also be driver updates for that webcam, and the capture program that came with it may have newer versions.
Even if you are successful on all of those fronts, the specs of that laughtop is marginal for even just playing back HD. And HP laughtops in particular are filled to the brim with pre-installed bloat and trashware, all TSR, that undermines that even more. Lastly, putting captured and edited files on the same drive as the system drive is to be avoided whenever possible (connect a separate external drive, preferably eSATA, and direct captured files there).
There are other posts here in videohelp where the topic of laughtops being used to capture and edit HD video has been chewed to a fine paste. You can peruse them first and see what you tips you can take.