pulldown.exe speed differences? Why?

[defense]

I'm just curious if anyone knows why there is sometimes a HUGE difference in speed when using pulldown on a .M2V file? I am using DVD2DVDR and I notice that sometimes when I run pulldown on that NEW.M2V file which I ran "force film" on, ..sometimes pulldown goes through hundreds of frames a second. Then other times, it goes through like 10-20 frames a second, and my hard drive seems to be a little louder and if i'm lucky it will eventually start to speed up. I've tried rebooting and then running pulldown again. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. I've run pulldown where it only went through 10 frames or so a second, and then I stopped it, and started it right back, and then it went through hundreds of frames with no problem. Anybody know why this is? Thanks in advance

[noobee]

two possible reasons, maybe more.

1. disk is heavily fragmented and/or you are saving to the same disk as your source file. try defragmenting or save to a different drive.

2. cache effects. if you stop and rerun pulldown.exe on a "smallish" m2v file, it is likely to be still in your file cache. so it'll read much faster the second time.

[defense]

@noobee, thanks for the suggestions. I think the first one was probably more accurate then the second, because sometimes when I retry pulldown for a second time, it runs slow as well the second time. It's like hit or miss. The defragmenting sounds like a possible problem, I thought that about some other issues as well. How often should a person defragment when ripping movies? I used to defragment once every two months or so, but I am thinking that being that I can rip an average of at least one or two movies a day, and with pulldown and reencoding, I can have those two folders take up about 25-30 GB'S. So should I defragment once a week/month? Also, I only have one partition....40 GB maxtor hard drive. When you say that I am saving to the source disk, do you mean I should use a different "drive?" If so, I can't, because I don't have dual partitions. If you are saying that I should save my pulldown.m2v file to a different folder, then I guess I could try that, although I don't see why it would help. Thanks again for the info, and let me know how often you think under the circumstances, I should defrag. Thanks

[jarvis1781]

doing all of what you are doing on one hard drive is really making that drive work dude.

you should really have at least 2...as for me I have 5 but only use 3 for the movies

i rip the whole DVD to one drive. then reencode to another drive.

then save the final project to the last drive

that sure saves a whole lot of wear and tear

your hard drive must be getting very HOT if you do all that on one drive

[defense]

@ jarvis 1781, I don't think i'm gonna go the route of 3 HD's, but I understand what you are saying. I have always thought Maxtor are the World's best hard drives, and the abuse I've given it just reenforce my belief. Western Digital are up there, but not like Maxtor. I will continue to make use of every kb of this 40 GB Hard Drive and if it eventually burns out, then I have a ghost image, and I will just upgrade at that time to 100 GB Maxtor HD. If that 100 GB drive burns out within one year, then it will be covered under the warranty. For some reason though, I don't think my drive will have any problems any time soon. Maxtor is unreal. Thanks for the advice though.

[noobee]

like what jarvis1781 said, having at least two physical harddisks will help speed up things alot, and imho, is even more important than defragmentation (because i have never defragmented my drives before )

the problem is worse if your single maxtor 40gb is a 5400rpm drive with a slow seek time. using different partitions on the same hard disk is no use, because the partitions still belong to the same physical disk.

in general, the source and destination locations of "fast large-file passes" should be different physical drives.

dvd -> ripper -> c:\vob
c:\vob -> encoder -> d:\m2v (not so critical bec encoding is "slow", but can reduce total seeks)
d:\m2v -> pulldown -> c:\dropm2v (important)
c:\dropm2v -> author -> d:\dvdout (important)

c: and d: are, of course, different hard drives. a subtle note. here, i'm assuming c: is your faster drive (if they are different) for two reasons:

1. writes are generally slower than reads, so you want a faster drive for writing in the pulldown step.

2. the audio source in the author step is in c:\vob, therefore c:\ is more heavily worked because it reads both audio and dropm2v from the same drive.

my guess on why you are seeing hit-and-miss for the 2nd run of pulldown is that you may have trashed the cache if the 1st run was stopped too late and hence the contents of the file cache was replaced with newer data. in this case, running a 2nd time forces the file system to re-read the data file and will be slow again. if the 1st run was small, then the read of the 2nd run for initial data will be really fast. you can try it as an experiment

[defense]

@ noobee, thanks again for the info. I don't doubt what you & jarvis are saying. It seems to make logical sense, however, I haven't had any problems with my drive and if a pulldown here and there is slower then normal, then I don't sweat that. My reencodes are always super quick. My system is a P IV 2.4 GH's, and encoding and authoring is not a problem as far as time goes. I will keep my one drive though because it has worked out great for me thus far. Maybe in the future if I need to, I will experiment with multiple disks. One other thing, my 40 gig drive is 7200 rpm, not 5400 rpm. I made sure I got the 7200 when I bought it a year ago. Thanks again for the info.