I've been trouble shooting and posted once. I'm getting closer to the solution but still having problems.

Trouble:
When capturing from a Panasonic PV-DV701 through pinnacle studio 8 and the firewire card it came with to the hard drive, the AVI file shows colored pixel spots on the screen. There is a frame loss of 150 to 250 per minute, in which I never noticed a frame loss window until this problem started. These spots show all through the edit/author and burn process to DVD.

However, the spots don't show up when viewing through the camcorder itself or through it to the TV set. I've gone through the Frame Drop>Sticky in the capture forum and done what I can do while still in the process of trying to understand other parts of it.

I think I've narrowed it down to a few problems.
1) The firewire on the camera or wire itself or card suddenly went bad. (I've sampled from both firewire connections)
2) There is some sort of electrical disturbance in the house wiring.


Things worked fine on the first few projects until:
1) We moved from an apartment to a house some 25 miles away using different Power Company.

2) The 32mb maxi gamer prophet II card that worked fine with other captures, burned out and I'm substituting with a 16mb 3Dfx Interactive voodoo Banshee until I figure out what to replace it with. (From what I've read the video card shouldn't have anything to do with it especially since it's the avi that is bad.)

3) I upgraded to Studio 8.10.xx. (I've since undeleted and reinstalled 8.4.x but still no luck)

AVI details
IMAGE 720x480
AUDIO
Bit rate 1024kps
Sample size 16
Format PCM
VIDEO
Frame rate 29/sec
Video sample size 24 bit
Video compression DVCodec

Capture info
"Full DV quality" whatever that means.
The windows are grayed and show:
720x480
Framerate 29.97
Data rate button selected at 3745 Kbps,
Audio settings are gray and read
PCM compression
16 bit stereo channel
Sample rate 48 kHz

Hard drive test shows read=37190 Kbps, write=41420 Kbps

In trouble shooting I've routed the capture wire so it's not around a magnetic fields and I unplugged internet and speaker wires, upped the CPU to 133 so now I get 1.5 Ghz instead of the 100 or 1.1Ghz, added second dedicated HD 7200rpm 8mb cache and old sound blaster live.