Canopus ADVC110 dropping frames

[BonnieW88]

I used the ADVC100 for years and it worked perfectly until it didn't. I replaced it with ADVC110 and use it with WinDV. Things worked great dropping zero frames. Now when I try to capture video it drops frames by the hundreds in the first few minutes. I'm now using Windows 7.
Is it my hardware or my software or my operating system? This is driving me crazy.

[edDV]

I used the ADVC100 for years and it worked perfectly until it didn't. I replaced it with ADVC110 and use it with WinDV. Things worked great dropping zero frames. Now when I try to capture video it drops frames by the hundreds in the first few minutes. I'm now using Windows 7.
Is it my hardware or my software or my operating system? This is driving me crazy.

What is your hard drive arrangement?

DV capture is a real time data stream to a file. It is not a file copy.

DV capture works best when the destination is a separate internal drive (PATA or SATA). eSATA works as well. They all use isolated hardware disk controllers.

Capture to a single laptop or desktop drive can receive interruption from OS processes on the same drive. Capture to a USB drive has similar issues since the USB disk controller is a software process.

I rarely see DV frame drops. When I do is is with a near full fragmented drive. You can force frame drops by copying files to/from the same drive that is capturing.

[BonnieW88]

Thanks for the response.

It's a new pc running windows 7, 4 gb ram and a tb hard drive. I'm saving to my videos and connected via firewire. The other day I had this trouble....I kept playing around and recorded with no dropped frames. I thought the problem had fixed itself until tonight. It's ridiculous how many frames it's dropping.

[BonnieW88]

That was the problem....saving to my hard drive. When I switched to an extenal USB drive, no frame loss. Whew! I'm so relieved that it's not the Canopus or the pc. Thank you.

[lordsmurf]

USB2 data rate is generally too slow for DV transfer. Be careful of this, as you may lose dropped frames again. USB2 quality always varies wildly between systems.

[edDV]

Thanks for the response.

It's a new pc running windows 7, 4 gb ram and a tb hard drive. I'm saving to my videos and connected via firewire. The other day I had this trouble....I kept playing around and recorded with no dropped frames. I thought the problem had fixed itself until tonight. It's ridiculous how many frames it's dropping.

This is not recommended for capture. For reliability, you need...

1. A second internal (PATA/SATA) drive for video capture. PCI bus mastering isolates IEEE-1394 to hard drive operations from OS operations.

2. An eSATA external drive. An eSATA drive uses the same hardware disk controller and PCI bus mastering.

If you must use an external IEEE-1394 or USB2 drive, or an internal OS laptop drive, best to create a separate boot state that turns off all OS services and don't run other applications while capturing. Many will say Firewire or USB2 capture isn't a problem until they discover that it is a problem (i.e. reliability).

Also, don't attempt capture on drives that are near full. Fragmented free space will cause frame loss while the drive seeks.

[BonnieW88]

Thank you, Ed..............I appreciate your advice.

[LightWeightProducer]

Although you don't mention it, if you are using Windows' task scheduler to launch WinDV to record something automatically you are most likely running foul of Windows 7 (and Vista's) IO prioritisation. By default processes launched by the task scheduler are given low IO priority which effectively means that if WinDV writes to a disc that something else is accessing, it will tend to lose out, stall and you will see WinDV's Q value skyrocket and eventually frames get dropped.

If this is what you are doing, you can adjust the tasks priority by exporting it to XML, editing the <priority> value and setting it to say 4 (default 7), deleting the task and then re-import it.

[BonnieW88]

Thank you for your post, LightWeight......I wasn't using task scheduler but I was getting the same result you described. It doesn't happen any more now that I'm saving to an external hard drive. I appreciate your input.