Capturing DV without losing frames

[rangerfan12]

I have a Sony DCR-TRV120 with a PYRO Basic DV Firewire card.
Since I installed the fire wire card, I have not been able to capture anything at all without dropping 30-60% of my frames. I have been using ULEAD Video Studio 5 and I tried Virtual Dub, both with no results. Is there some other setting I need to make in order to capture without losing everything?

I have tried numerous formats within Video Studio (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI - all NTSC with a frame rate of 29.97). They all drop the frames. I have tried lowering my capture format to lesser quality and still I am dropping frames.

I am going to try Pinnacle Studio and I am also defragmenting my drive. Is there any other suggestions? I am a newbie and getting very frustrated.

My objective by the way is to create VCD's from home movies.
System: AMD 1.4GH, 512mb, 15 gig primary and 10 gig secondary drive, Sony DCR TRV-120 corder, Pyro Basic DV firewire card, Win XP.

Thanks,

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rangerfan12 on 2001-12-29 12:41:40 ]</font>

[nikt]

Had the same problem for a while on my system. You realy should be using a dedicated HDD for video capture and make sure it it well defragmented REGULARLY. Use a 7200 RPM drive, make it a primary partition on a seperate IDE port (buy another PCI IDE card if you need it) and make sure it is big (60Gb +) ..! You say you have 2 HDDs..? Are you using the secondary for capture..? If not you should be. Also 10 Gb does not give you much scope

Also turn off audio & video prieview while capturing if you can and don't have any other apps running.

[Tommy]

I agree that a bigger hard drive would be helpful, if for anything to give you more room to work with since dv files can get pretty large. However your system should not be droping frames. I'm sorry but aside from the space requirments for the videos, a DV transfer from a digial camcorder to the computer just doesn't require that much power (considering your comp). Pinnacle studio is really good for getting the data from camera to computer but be aware that it does not do the best mpeg compression.

I would check the speed of the drives first and then try the new software. Actually before pinnacle will let you transfer it will test your capture drive for speed.

[lchiu7]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-29 14:27:04, nikt wrote:
Had the same problem for a while on my system. You realy should be using a dedicated HDD for video capture and make sure it it well defragmented REGULARLY. Use a 7200 RPM drive, make it a primary partition on a seperate IDE port (buy another PCI IDE card if you need it) and make sure it is big (60Gb +) ..! You say you have 2 HDDs..? Are you using the secondary for capture..? If not you should be. Also 10 Gb does not give you much scope

Also turn off audio & video prieview while capturing if you can and don't have any other apps running.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>
Interesting I have started doing video capture also, but with a Digital 8 camera, over firewire to a model Sony Vaio Picturebook (PII-400) using the supplied Sony DV capture software. It's neat in that the software can control the recorder, you can view the tape on the PC and capture it. Capturing a few minutes of video (about 1G) I didn't notice many dropped frames though there were occasional sound blips. The playback of the video using MMP was very smooth. Now I have to work out how to make DivX files out of these huge AVI files without interlacing problems

Larry

[Patric]

You should not drop frames as the firewire card is doing all the work. Even a 5400 RPM harddisk will do the job. I have a Maxtor 5400 and a 7200 and both work well.

They only thing I can advise to you is to capture into native DV format and not into MPEG or other streams as in that case the PC has to convert the incoming stream into your format.

If you capture in native DV the stream is directly written to the harddisk, e.g. that's what a firewire card was meant to be used for.

Did you check that your firewire card is using a single IRQ? Sometimes when installing the card Windows allocates a shared IRQ for the firewire and in such a setup dropping frames is unavoidable.

Good luck

Patric

[humdinger]

how would you check the irq thing, and what would i do if the card is sharing an irq?

[Greg12]

I use a small program called DVIO.

It's free. I doesn't have ney fancy features.

It has

"capture video"
"send video to camera"

but I love it because I can force Type 2 DV captures which Virtual Dub doesn't seem to bitch about like it does Type 1.

I drop about 1 frame in a 10 minute capture.

[Faceman101]

Possibly DMA isn't check on the HD? Pinnacle won't let you capture if your HD isn't capable. So you'll see what happens once you try that.

[rangerfan12]

ALL,
Thanks for the input. I tried Pinnacle and sure enough, both of my drive were coming up short on the read/write speeds (both 5400). I added a 7200 and all is working great. From what I have seen, Pinnacle is quite easy to use.

Thanks for all the advise. I was not looking at hd as the problem.

PS. How this is worth it....my wife is calculating if it would be cheaper to bring a professional videographer with us everywhere.