Please Help, dropping 24%

[KDB3K]

I have an ATI AIW Radeon 8500 64 MB card that I am using to capture the video. My system is a 933 PIII, and I have 512 MB of ram. I am using the ATI Digital VCR to capture the composite input, which is coming from my vcr. I am capturing to my second hard drive, a drive that my OS is not located on. I am running windows 2000 professional. If anyone has any ideas or suggesting, I would appreciate them. I was following this guide http://lordsmurf.hypermart.net/conversion/dvdguide.htm and dropping 24 % of frames. I thank you all in advance.

[KDB3K]

I was capturing on the settings that guide says, 325*480 or something, mpeg2, 48000 16 bit stereo audio, 4000 bitrate

[KDB3K]

bump...i would appreciate any help at all.

[flaninacupboard]

well capping to mpeg is not a good idea for either speed or quality. if it needs to be mpeg, try and find the bottleneck. open task manager (ctrl alt delete) and watch the processor graph when you are capping. if it hits 100% then that's your problem, buy a new processor, or capture in .AVI (and by this i don't mean Divx, i mean something like Mjpeg or huffyuv) or buy a dedicated mpeg capture board.

[KDB3K]

ok, thank you...i will try to capture huffyuv, do you know a good program that you can capture to huffyuv with from an ATI AIW card?? I don't think i can use the ATI digital VCR to captur to huffyuv

[KDB3K]

ok i'm using virtual dub to capture and i dropped 149 out of 15533 frames using huffyuv. Thanks for the tip. I now have another question though. Those stats were when i was capturing to my C:\ drive. However, when i try to capture to my D:\ drive, I'm dropping about 50% of the frames. Do you know why there could be such a difference between the drives?? I have 30 gigs free on my D drive, and 3 free on my C drive, so i would like to use the D drive, but I just dont know how to get the D drive to perform as the C drive does. Do you know of anything i could do?? Do you think it would help if i made the D drive be the secondary master instead of the primary slave drive?

C Drive - WD 13 GB Drive, Master, Don't Remember RPMs
D Drive - WD 40 GB Drive, Slave, 7200 RPM

[fmctm1sw]

ok i'm using virtual dub to capture and i dropped 149 out of 15533 frames using huffyuv. Thanks for the tip. I now have another question though. Those stats were when i was capturing to my C:\ drive. However, when i try to capture to my D:\ drive, I'm dropping about 50% of the frames. Do you know why there could be such a difference between the drives?? I have 30 gigs free on my D drive, and 3 free on my C drive, so i would like to use the D drive, but I just dont know how to get the D drive to perform as the C drive does. Do you know of anything i could do?? Do you think it would help if i made the D drive be the secondary master instead of the primary slave drive?

C Drive - WD 13 GB Drive, Master, Don't Remember RPMs
D Drive - WD 40 GB Drive, Slave, 7200 RPM

My VHS caps always drop more frames than my sat tv box. A time base corrector is supposed to make improvemets in this area. Also, you may want to try to put those drive on different IDE chanels like you already mentioned.

[Mike6453]

You might try defraging your hard drive. That might help the performance.


Mike

[KDB3K]

thanks, i will try defragging it first, and if that does not work, i will put it on a different channel

[KDB3K]

hmm defragmenting didnt help...tomorrow i'll try switching ide channels, thakns for the help guys, i'll let you know about ide channels

[Will Hay]

I format my second hdd before each capture.
If you have a second hdd purely for capture then that's what you should use it for and nothing else, certainly not for storage
I used the huffyuv but found the PicVideo MJPEG codec at quality 19/20 was perfectly fine and at only one third of the file size huffyuv produces.
I capture with Virtualdub at 720 x 576 via an ATI 64mb DDR ViVo card and then encode at 8000VBR with TMPGEnc and output to dvd-r.
Changing the IDE of the second drive to secondary primary will help.
Do you have a VIA chipset on your motherboard?
It is well documented that VIA are horrendous with regards PCI Bus sharing.
Your drive may be faulty (although I doubt it).
There's a utility on the web you can use (called 'sandra soft' something - I've never used it but hear it's very good) to check the data rate of each of your drives.
Try the PicVideo codec, I lost frames using the huffyuv (although not enough to concern me) and I have an Athlon XP2000+ - it's very CPU intensive.
Bear in mind, of your last test you dropped 149 out of 15533 frames.
I'm in the UK so that's six seconds spread over nearly eleven minutes. I think if it was me I would re-capture but considering you're capturing from VHS it's not exactly the end of the world, is it?
If that's the best you ever get then you're not doing too bad, although I guess checking to see if your hdd is not failing and formatting might be the answer - assuming you don't hav a VIA chipset
I tend to lose no more than ten frames (less than one second) in each capture, and each capture can be up to two hours.
If you can't solve it my advice would be to encode your capture (to mpeg1, 2, whatever...) and see if you're happy with the finished result.
Good luck, and post back with your results.
Will

[Dumpster]

This thread may be of help...
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=140048

Dumpster

[tmfwy]

Hi KDK,

Dropping frames is normal for VHS tapes, ESPECIALLY if the tape is rather dirty / noisy & contains lots of distortions. The important thing is to actually keep both audio and video in sync, even during dropped frames.

I once started video capturing with a BT8x8 based tuner. I was a nervous wreck after each session as the captured footage does not necessarily guarantee a good capture, even with minimal frame drops. I usually check a minute at the start, middle and end of the footage for AV sync issues.

That is were dedicated video capture cards come in. I purchased a cheap DC30 ( I know it is now outdated and unsupported but hey, it does give great AV sync! ), even when I had a 1000+ dropped frames over a 9000+ total frame capture. That tape was extremely poor and mouldy. After gtting the card, I just stopped the capture without checking the quality, knowing that the card did its job.

TV tuner cards were not meant to handle bad video and you should be careful when you come across that. Should you have alot of tapes to convert, I would suggest upgrading to a dedicated prosumer video capture card and a good capture software. Two things to take note of. You DON'T need real time effects nor do you need Premiere. What I used was Win98 and virtualdub. I just capped in segmented AVIs of 4 gbs in length.
Then, I switched over to Win2k to do the conversion.

Hope that helps

[mkelley]

Just to give you another perspective...

I use Adobe Premiere to capture from my Hollywood DV Bridge (which converts from analog to firewire). Even on the crappiest VHS footage I have (stuff like some of my ancient first season MST3K episodes which are almost unwatchable and difficult to get a stable frame with even constantly fiddling with the tracking control -- trust me, these are *terrible* images which push the envelope of bad footage :>) I *never* drop any frames, even after two hours of capturing. So I don't think it's a given you will drop frames on bad footage.

Indeed, since I made the "fix" to the HB I have never lost a frame during capture of anything (probably around 100 hours worth of stuff captured so far -- but I'm only 5% into my project :>) Every now and then my capture process will "stop" -- either my cats dislodge some cable somewhere (they are into everywhere), we get a power spike, or perhaps it's just gremlins. I just restart the capture and splice the stuff together (this happens very seldom but I thought I'd at least mention it in case it occurs to someone else).

Quite frankly, I wouldn't settle for any dropped frames in a capture process (but that's just me). I do know this can lead to audio problems down the road when burning to DVD.

My system specs: Dell Pentium 4, 2.4gz, 1 gig RAM, 2 80 gig hard drives (the second drive is only for video capture) running XP Pro.

[KDB3K]

@ Dumpster -- Thanks for the link to your other thread. The DMA was "DMA if available" on my D drive, but the grayed out box was PIO only. I downloaded some new VIA drivers, and i uninstalled and reinstalled the controller and the bus like 8 timnes and finally last time i rebooted, walla, it was Ultra DMA. So hopefully that was my problem. It's a bit late to get the VCR right now, so i'll try capturing tomrrow to see how it goes.


@Silky -- I will try the mjpeg codec. I think i tried it earlier and it left a big watermark all over my capture that said picvideo.com, so i went with huffyuv instead. I will try the PicVideo MJPEG codec tomorrow, though. Thank you for your information on that, and also, you talking about VIA chipset was what made me think to get new chipset drivers.


@ mkelley -- I hope i can drop no frames like you, that'd be really cool


@ tmfwy -- I may purchase a dedicated card for capturing later on down the road, but right now I'm just a high school kid with no money But do dedicated cards cut down on the sync problems?? Cuz in the video i captured the other night my audio was way out of sync. I hope that next time i capture it will be in sync though.

I'll let you guys know how the capture goes tomorrow.

KDB3K

[WeBe]

I have had the same problem with capturing, only in my case 30-35% of the captured frames were dropped and it took quite while to find out what caused the problem. This is what I found out.

Most capture utilities (still) use the Video for Windows (VfW 1.1) drivers, actually developed for Windows 3.x, so quite old. Several years ago Microsoft developed the Windows Driver Model (WDM), but software developers didn't implement this because VfW was still supported, so why bother? Until Windows XP.

Since then, new hardware comes with the new WDM-drivers. Capture software should use what is called Direct Show. Based on this new standard, capturing needs less performance of your system, resulting in less dropped frames. In my case now I always have 0% dropped frames, which is exactly as it should be. :P No need to look at DMA settings, defragmenting my disks before capturing etc.

When you want to capture and you select your source, do you see a WDM-driver mentioned?

Video software as Ulead VideoStudio uses Direct Show, but there is also a tiny capture utility, which is freeware. I always use this one because it is very easy to use and gives excellent results, especially when you use the huffyuv codec. It is called AmCap videocapture and you can download it from the site of Soundforge. It's only 41 kb to download. Just unzip and use it.

Hope this will solve your problem.

Wim.

[KDB3K]

i tried amcap and where ever there as black it left blue dots all over it. Is this the program or just the codec(huffy)?? Other than the blue dots it went well, audio was in sync and i dropped no frames. I will use amcap if i can figure out the blue dots problem.

I also tried capturing in virtualdub, and i just the mjpeg codec. It went very well, I only dropped 21 frames out of 35000. I messed around with the audio settings this time as well and the audio seems to be in sync. I could capture to the D drive this time with no problems.

It seems like evrything is going great now, except for the blue dots in amcap. No i can edit out the commercials and move on to the next video in my series of 5.

Thanks everyone for your help.

KDB3K

[WeBe]

You'll have to experiment with several settings. In huffyuv I use the setting 'Convert to YUY2', but I doubt if that solves your problem.

Amcap should work fine and not place any dots on your captured video. I don't have Amcap at hand right now, but I believe there are some settings for brightness and contrast. When these values are too high, it could perhaps cause these dots. Just try.

I noticed that Amcap is now version 2.72 and I use 2.70. I will try this new version and see what it does on my computer with black screens.

Anyway, I'm glad that your problem with dropped frames is fixed. When you can solve your problem with the dots, you're in business...

Wim.

[WeBe]

Sorry it took so long before I get back to you. Did have my own problems to sort out...

I tried Amcap 2.72 and it doesn't show any noise on a black screen on my computer.

Have you tried several settings with any results yet?

If you capture with another program (why not try Ulead Studio 7 of DVD Movie Factory 2 trials to capture) is the problem still there? If it is, it could also be a hardware problem.

If your problem is solved, please post a reply. How you solved the problem could be helpfull to others too, you know.

Wim.