Need help capturing video

[zillaman4]

I bought a Lucent IEEE-1394 firewire card and installed it. It's supposed to support up to 400 Mbit/s, but I can't get it to capture full screen video in a high quality mode. I have a Sony Digital8 (DRV-350) camcorder, 512mb RAM, 2.53 P4, and 160gig hard drive - twin 80gig drives with RAID. I think the hardware is sufficient and the camcorder seems to be fine. I've tried using 4 different kinds of capturing software (Sony Screenblaster,Adobe Premier, Pinnacle Studio 8, and Windows Movie Maker 2) and I'm getting a lot of dropped frames or the capture stops after several seconds. It works OK with a low resolution, but quality is what I wanted. Could it be the firewire card? It was inexpensive ($17 total) and purchased on Ebay. I would appreciate any advice.

I have defragmented my drive and disabled all unneeded running programs and it didn't help.

[BJ_M]

you are doing a transfer - not a capture ....


what do you mean it works on low resolution ? because the res is set by the DV device ....

you ARE transfering DV avi format are you not ?


that card is not great but should work ..

it doesnt mater what app you use as all you are doing is copying digtial data from one media to another ...


if you get stalls and dropped frames like this --- and your system seems more than fine ... it may be the card , or the camcorder , or the cable ...


i am bettting the camcorder ... but its only a guess

[donpedro]

Or trouble with HD setup. What numbers do you get when you are testing HD in Pinnacle Studio ? "Test Data Rate" in "Capture Source" option tab.

[zillaman4]

What I by low resolution -- there are a few ways to capture or transfer the video. I don't exactly know the difference between transferring and capturing. DV I can capture by an AVI or MPEG at the highest quailty (720x480). The most frames are dropped at that setting. The lower resolution is like 320x240. I can get that without dropped frames. Someone mentioned just tranferring the data, not a video capture, but I don't know how or if it can be done with a digital 8mm. I'm thinking of just buying a new card, but I might borrow a different DV camcorder and try it to make sure.

Thank you or responding.

[rcb]

give ScenalyzerLive (trialware) a shot.