Capturing AVIs with ATI AIW 16MB

[cifcap]

Just a quick question. I've been trying to capture high resolution (640 x 480 and 720 x 480) AVIs with the AIW 16mb, but I keep getting dropped frames. My system specs are as follows:

400mhz PII
BCM motherboard
128mb PC100
Samsung 5400rpm 6.4gb hdd (2 3.2 gb partitions)
Creative AWE32
Hi-val CD-ROM
Ricoh CD Burner
3.5 Floppy

I read the help file that is provided and it says to capture in ATI VCR 1.0 ou need at least a P166. If that's the case do I need to just upgrade my hard drive to an ATA-100 drive or both a more powerful processor and bigger ( and faster)HDD? Would adding more RAM help the situation? I would appreciate any help you folks can provide. Also does anyone know what the max. file size will be for Windows XP? Thanks

Ciffie

[kinneera]

How many frames are you dropping? A few every once in a while isn't going to be a big deal.

An ATA/100 drive will definitely improve your hard drive performance, but even upgrading to a 7200 RPM drive will have a substantial benefit as well.

[cifcap]

It varies quite a bit depeding on what I'm capturing. For example when I capture cartoon footage it's just fine (slighty choppy video but no dropped frames). However once the scene starts moving it goes up to 30+ dropped frames. I get the same result when capturing motorsport footage. I have no prblems capturing at say 320 x 240 or 352 x 288. It's just the (wanted)higher resolutions. Thanks for the reply.

Ciffie

[kinneera]

30+ dropped frames out of how many total? If we're talking 30 out of more than 3000, you shouldn't worry about it, since that would be less than 1% of all the frames dropped.

[patrickm]

make sure DMA is enabled on the drive you have now. capture to the drive not containing the windows swap file. defrag. reboot before you start capturing, and shut down all crap running in the background.

use VCR2 or MJPEG or MPEG-1 I-frame only high-bitrate to capture if you plan to re-encode. MMC 7.1 is better for MPEG, just make sure you install the DVD 4.1 update to fix capture problems too.

processor is probably #1 on the list to upgrade, with HDD not far behind. but a DMA66 drive should have no problems with AVIs using the VCRx or MJPEG codec or MPEG i-frame. 7200 RPM makes little difference capturing, because higher rotational speed really boosts random access performance, not sustained write/read. it's a little better, but not much at all. ATA100 would help some, but like i said the transfer rate on a DMA66 drive should be sufficient.

max file sizes are no different in XP than anything else. it's just like win2k, 4GB if you use FAT32, essentially none in NTFS. the AVI format does have it's own limits though.

[Greg12]

i think it's time for a new system.

drop the size your problem is you are capturing at a size your card and your system cannot handel. capture at 320x240 n watch magic happen.

[wingstar]

Try using a different compression codec, and see what wonder it will do for you. Huffyuv is the codec of choice.

[cifcap]

Thanks to all for the advice! The plan for me is to build a new PC based on the AMD 1.4ghz T-bird (266 FSB). And big and fast HDD to compliment it. I just wanted to see if I could get by for awhile longer with my current PC. There's nothing wrong with aside form lacking video work firepower.
Patrickm what limitations are there when using the AVI format? I'd like to, eventually, convert AVIs into DVD compliant MPEG2 files (hence capturing at high resolutions).
Is there a catch (aside from HDD space) to going this route?
Thanks again!

Ciffie

[wingstar]

Cifcap,

Going over to a higher CPU system will not resolve the frame droping problem. I start out with AMD K7 600Mhz - 700Mhz - 950Mhz - 1.27Ghz (O.C. to 1.33Ghz currently). The real problem is the codec that you are using to compress the captured AVI. If you are serious about capturing high resolution ( 720x480 @ 29.97fps ), then use huffyuv2.1.1 codec is the codec choice. ATI AIW128 16Mb is a good card to acquire vid input from, since it allows you to do capture with overlay option even at 720x480 resolution (or PAL). The deinterlacing feature it provides for vid input is also very nice. However, the software it provides for AVI or MPEG capture is nowhere close to the desire resolution. I have in my inventory, three ATI AIW128 ( 16Mb, 32Mb, and 32Mb PRO ). I can achieve 720x480 @ 29.97fps using my 600Mhz CPU without any frame dropping issue, and the hard disk i am using is a Western Digital ATA66 5400RPM at that!
The combination you need is either Virtualdub or AVI_IO, Huffyuv2.1.1 codec, and a big hard drive ( 30Gig = 2hrs ).

[patrickm]

lots of things can cause drops other than card/cpu/drive speed:
crappy vhs tape
poor timing from VCR/DVD player in relation to video card's clock (search for "jitter" and
"vhs", we wrote about this a while back)
ISA sound card, (or even a old or poor PCI version - i don't know much about the AWE32)
codec's cpu usage

[cifcap]

To all,

Thanks for the advice and I've found that using the VCR1 codec works very well with my current system. I can't wait to try it with my new system!

CIFCAP