Dropping Frames............I have read and dont know why?

[2Busy]

I am a newbie, but I have read til I am blue in the face. Here is the system. Athlon XP 2200, 512 meg ram 120 gig 7200 rpm ata133 drive running Win XP Pro with an Asus 7133 tuner capture card and an ATI Radeon video card. I am experimenting with different software to capture and render, mainly at this point to convert some old VHS tapes. I started out trying to capture the whole movie and then when I saw the results I went down to 10 minute segments to try to find the problem. I seem to be dropping tons of frames. I started with PowerVCR and Ulead, and moved to either VirtualDub or VirtualVCR where I got an actual dropped frame count. I was shopped to learn that in 10 or 15 min segment that I was dropping over 20,000 frames. I read and read. I disabled my network connection, made sure I was not doing any multitasking. At this point I dont know if it is me or the capture card. All help greatly appreciated.

2Busy

[overloaded_ide]

Defrag you hardrive if you haven't lattely. A slow hardrive can cause dropped frames, and they slow when fragmented of course. You probably already knew that! But you dropped too many frames for me to really think that's the problem, but it don't hurt.

The rest of your system looks good to me for capturing!
MIne is 1700xp with 1 gig ddr, W2k. I never drop frames. I don't recall any proablem with 256mb or 512mb either.
I capture with a ATI AIW 7500.

I don't know anything about your capture card. I would look for settings in your capture program and check for conflicts with the capture card and video card or other system resources. Maybe re-install the drivers for the card?

Your system should be plenty big enough and fast enough, but if you dropped 20,000 frames in 10-15 minutes you didn't capture much!

At 30 frames per second that only 18,000 frames in 10 minutes or 27,000 in 15 minutes! SO at best you only captured 7,000 frames in 15 minutes! About 4 minutes worth

I am pretty sure that is a system problem, like resource conflicts!

[accountwiz]

Boy, I've received alot of help from lurking at this site. Maybe I can return the favor here. I had this same issue with my Leadtek WinFast 2000XP, and this is how I fixed it. First of all, I only dropped frames when CPU utilization reached 100%, so I made a concious effort to not do a ton of multi-tasking/web surfing while capturing. This wasn't getting the job done, though. I was still maxing out system utilization regularly.

Now, my capture software uses about 70% of system resources to bring in 720x480 4000br MPEG2, so I could do virtually NOTHING else while capturing because of all my resident apps/ utilities. Even when away from my pc, system use would spike and I'd drop frames. Very frustrating.

Then I remembered that Windows XP allows you to set up multiple users with different 'profiles.' So, I went into control panel/ users and set up a user named Capturing, which had administrative privileges. I switched to this user and disabled wallpaper/ screensavers etc. I dropped my screen resolution to 1024x768 and 16bit color vs. 32bit. Then I went to start/ run and ran 'msconfig.' I disabled ALL startup items with the exception of Zone Alarm and my tv/ capturing utility.

After doing all these things, I can capture without dropping frames. I switch to this user whenever I just want to capture or author in DVD Workhop, and then I switch back to my primary user profile when finished. I allow myself one instance of Internet Explorer while capping and my system usage tops out at 75-80%, which is perfect in my opinion. My captures are fantastic.

Hope some of these steps can give you improved capturing, too.

Joe

[mkelley]

This comes up all the time. Here is the definitive post:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=157660&highlight=dropping+frames

The thing to be aware of is you *can* achieve zero dropped frames -- I've captured hundreds of hours of footage on my system without a single dropped frame and my system isn't particularly special in any way -- and it should be your goal. Don't settle for anything less.