WinDV: 125 frames dropped - Do I need to re-transfer?

[vocalmind]

I just realize, I saw it in the middle of my transfer. Is there any acceptable drop frames?

[junkmalle]

acceptable drop rate for DV: zero

Unless of course there's a bad spot on the DV tape and there's nothing you can do about it.

You might also have problems if you're capturing from a VHS tape (via a camcorder or analog/DV device -- a bad VHS tape can cause dropouts in the DV stream.

[edsmith77]

Shouldn't you also consider the length of the clip. If you are talking 50,000 frames the 125 lost ones may not be a problem. However, if the clip was only 126 frames long, then......

[junkmalle]

DV requires so little bandwidth you should expect to never drop frames on a modern computer; unless there is something wrong with the source. If you drop frames from a clean source there is something wrong with your computer. Find the problem and fix it.

[nelson133]

The only time I have ever had dropped frames with dv input to windv was when i was triying to do too many other things at the same time. Opening just one more program would cause a number of dropped frames. Nyah Levi

[vocalmind]

The only time I have ever had dropped frames with dv input to windv was when i was triying to do too many other things at the same time. Opening just one more program would cause a number of dropped frames. Nyah Levi

Thats what I experience too. I re-transfer back and it has NO drop frames. WinDV buffering is not a foolproof afterall. But its a great program nonetheless.

[proxyx99]

Dropped frames screw audio sync.

[vocalmind]

Dropped frames screw audio sync.

You mean a drop frame can cause audio sync problem? I thought if the frame drop the audio also drop. Means audio is still sync with respect to the individual remaining frame.

[proxyx99]

Audio has to be resynced by a capturing thing, takes a moment and usually results in tiny shifts. Audio drops as well as you indicated but not always in a perfect way. After a frame is dropped capturing device has to readjust and restore sync (realign). Depending on the freq. of drops and their number you may end up with misaligned tracks.

[Gabriel_Brazil]

So,

A lot of people told me that with DV and FIREWIRE there is no dropped frames. But I have a P3 1.13 with 256 MB and a Quantum Fireball LCT15.
When I´m capturing the video keeps dropping.
My question is : My final AVI file will be fine ?

Thanx.

[neomaine]

vocalmind/gabriel_brazil,

I'm willing to bet some good money that your problem is with having a single hard drive on your computer. For video capture, that is a very chancy thing to do. You should:

- Clean/delete/uninstall whatever you don't need on the hard drive to leave as much free space as possible. (From the posted size of your drives, you'll need to. Clean your browser cache, temp files....)

- Defragment the drive. (Want to make sure you have some nice contiguous space to write the capture to. The less moving around the drive looking for free space, the better.)

- Make sure there is NOTHING else running at the same time. (Though the CPU/mem specs seem to be OK, you want to make sure that the hard drive doesn't have anything else to do. Page/swap, running progs, creating temp files.....)

If another hard drive for capturing is not in your future, then I'd recommend that you (re-install the OS if needed) create a second partition used just for capturing. It doesn't fix all the problems, but at least you'd have some contiguous space reserved just for capture. Not perfect, but its something.

Quite simply, that single hard drive is being asked to do a lot of things and capturing is very i/o intensive to say the least.

[State Of Mind]

vocalmind, lol... it's frame drop, not sample-and-frame drop.
I have a P4 3.0 GHz with 512 PC3200 DDR RAM and I could usually have 1 or 2 programs (Not bloated consuming crap like antivirus or spyware appz... basically nothing that takes up more than 10 MBs of RAM) and my DV captures with WinDV never dropped a frame.

[Gabriel_Brazil]

Neomaine, thanx for the PERFECT answer !

I´ll make the 2nd partition you told me.
I´m thinking about buying a new PC, I think it could be a Celeron D or Semprom.
The most important in a capture process is the Processor, RAM or a Fast HD ?

Thanx,
Gabriel_Brazil

[junkmalle]

Gabriel, be sure your hard drive is running in DMA mode. That's the single most important thing with DV capture. Go to Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers -> Primare IDE Channel -> (right click) Properties -> Advanced Settings. Make sure that Transfer Mode is set to "DMA if Available", not "PIO only".

[Gabriel_Brazil]

Thank you so much junkmalle.

Let me ask you guys a question: I can capture without problems using a Semprom Processor or it´s necessary to use a Celeron D or P4 ?

Thanx,
Gabriel_Brazil

[junkmalle]

An AMD Sempron should have no problems capturing DV.

[proxyx99]

DV transfer has more to do with HD data transfer rate rather then anything else. Most decent CPU's will do.

[takeshi]

You can capture with as little as a PIII (I have in the past) without dropping frames. For rendering, you'll definitely want something faster though.

[siccoyote]

I've found I can encode Mpeg2 footage at the same time as capturing DV with no dropped frames, but I do have an AMD64 3200.