Frameloss Mystery, NEED Help PLEASE

[FuyukiFan7]

Hello. I am trying to cap from VHS. I have tried many programs, and many codecs, including adobe premiere, avi_io, and virtual dub. The codecs I have used consist of mainly huffyuv, and picvideo mjpeg. I am running Windows XP, Pentium 3 797 mhz, 256 of sd ram, a Radeon 8500dv, and 2 hard-drives, consisting of a Quantum 30gb Fireball, and a Western Digital 120 gb 7200 rpm 8megbuffer. I have followed all the tutorials on this site, but none have been helpful to me when capping, because I still get frameloss. Weather it is capping from TV, or from VHS, it's the same process. It starts off well, with 0 frameloss, and then when I reach about 4-5 minutes of capping, frameloss begins, and it starts slow, and speeds up gradually. I read with XP both hd's are automatically on a DMA default, and there is no option to put them on DMA. I have been trying to get help from many friends I Have who cap with no problems, but cannot figure out what my problem is. If anyone can help me, it would be most greatly appreciated, feel free to post here, or send me an IM or E-mail at FuyukiFan7@aol.com. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day.

[Chaoji3791]

Hmmm ... your PC is certainly powerful enough to capture video without frame drops. Some suggestions:

* Try running as few background programs as possible during capture. The more RAM you have available during capture, the better.
* Put a CD in your CD drive and leave it in there during capture so that your CPU doesn't waste cycles polling the device during capture to see if there's a disc in there.
* Try capturing audio and video separately. When I need to capture long pieces of analogue footage, I use avi_io with the audio capture disabled (in conjunction with a Studio DC10_ capture card) and I NEVER drop a single frame, and my PC's FAR less powerful than yours. I usually just capture the audio separately and apply a "time warp" filter to it using a sound editing program like Sound Forge if there's a duration mismatch between the audio and the video clips.

These are the only suggestions I can come up with at the moment but no doubt someone else will be able to come up with something better.

C h a o j i

[henan]

Try defragmenting your disk.

[ironwood321]

Is your capture machine the same as the machine you use for everything else.

When capturing especially analogue it is important to have the leanest system as possible.

Preferable a separate machine only with the necessary capture drivers and software and an empty hardrive or partition to capture to. This also includes no virus killers etc.

Failing that if you using 2000 or XP you should install a separate copy to a dedicated partition and use this only for capture.

It is important you capture to an empty drive and transfer your finished project to you destination media ASAP and capture to a fresh drive

If your capturing from tape you could be experiencing drop outs etc make sure you use good tapes and use the same machine which recorded them with. Failing this you might have to invest in a £300 TBC