Help needed with Pinnacle Dazzle 150 used to capture vhs

[ratabase1]

I recently purchased the Pinaccle Dazzle 150 with Studio 9 Quickstart to transfer some vhs tapes to DVD. When I capture the video/audio from the tape I do not get any dropped frames, but after I complete the dvd creation and play the resulting files, the video plays back choppy like it is missing some frames. Any ideas? Anybody else use this to transfer vhs to dvd and willing to share their settings? My computer is a 1100 mhz with 640 mb ram. Thanks in advance for your help.

[harley2ride]

Your system is fairly marginal for doing this, but it still should be doable. First start by defragging your HD. Then shutdown all non-essential tasks (virus scan, etc). If necessary boot to safe mode and capture from there. If that doesn't help, it could be that the encoder with your software isn't very good. But start with the first things and see if there is any improvement.

[ratabase1]

I tried your suggestion of defragging my hard drive and disabling any programs not needed (ie. antivirus), but it still didn't correct my issue. Any other ideas? What settings do you use? Do you capture at the best quality? I have another computer that is 1500 mhz. When I get a chance I was going to try hooking the dazzle 150 up to it and giving it a try and see if it is any better.

[harley2ride]

Go ahead and try the other system. One thing you need to realize is that both your hardware and software are very low level (cheap stuff). If you do some reading on www.videoguys.com, you will see what professional and semi professionals use. I was able to get a semipro setup for $140.00 (ADS PYRO AV/LINK, and ADOBE PREMIERE 6.5). For an additional $40.00, I bought an ADS Firewire card off ebay that came with Ulead Studio 7. If you watch for deals, you can get good high grade stuff for a pretty good deal.

[The_Doman]

When I capture the video/audio from the tape I do not get any dropped frames, but after I complete the dvd creation and play the resulting files, the video plays back choppy like it is missing some frames.

Can you playback your recordings normally on the PC before you put them to DVD?
Also you can do a test with another source (DVD/Tuner) to if that works better.
I read the Dazzle 150 uses hardware Mpeg2 compression so your computer speed will not be a real issue here.

[ratabase1]

Thanks for your help. No, the video recordings don't play normally on the PC before burning it to DVD. Could my problem be tied to my video card? This computer has an ATI Technologies Inc. 3D RAGE LT PRO PCI [Display adapter].

Does the video card have any baring on capturing from my vcr? I'll try another input source later this week and see if I get the same results.

[ratabase1]

Thanks for all of the suggestions, but I didn't have any luck following them. I did however, upgrade my video card with an ATI Radeon 9550 (256 mb ddr) along with adding a PCI usb 2.0 card with 4 ports. Early results indicate that I don't have the choppy playback problem anymore. I will update this post if this hasn't corrected my problem.