Losing frames when capturing with DV

[Memo_182]

I'm trying to capture a movie through my DV camera but I keep losing frames when I try to capture. I've tried using Premier and Windows Movie Maker, and both drop frames. Is there anyone who can give me any tips on what I can do?

[Innershield]

When you say capture, do you mean you are capturing analog? Or are you transfering DV via firewire?

[Memo_182]

I'm transfering/capturing via firewire. I believe it's a 4pin-to-4pin, the ilink sized connection that sony uses

[Innershield]

How many frames are you dropping

[Memo_182]

I'm dropping like 250 frames for two minutes of video

[Innershield]

That's a lot. Do you have other programs running

[Memo_182]

no I clsoed most of the taskbar programs, and also ended some processes in the task manager.

[Innershield]

Have you tried defragging

[Richard_G]

250 frames dropped in 2 minutes, 'kin 'ell, tha's a lot. Dropped frames are often caused by bottlenecks in your system somewhere but as DV is only ~3.8 Mb/sec, that's a big bottleneck. If you can't maintain that sort of data rate then you have a serious problem. My machine is a lower spec than yours (AMD 2200XP, 512Mb DDR, 120Gb UDMA133 capture drive) and I don't drop any frames when capturing full frame uncompressed avi at nearly 30 Mb/sec.

You don't say what motherboard you have (and I don't know much about Intel systems), but the first thing I would check would be motherboard chipset drivers. The next would be to make sure DMA is enabled on your hard drives.

If you have any speed checking utilities (Sisoft Sandra?), try checking your hard drive sustained data transfer rate. Anything less than about 40 Mb/sec means you've got a problem somewhere.

[FT Shark]

Can't you do a direct transfer with the firewire? If so why are you using premier or moviemaker.

[bugster]

Can't you do a direct transfer with the firewire? If so why are you using premier or moviemaker.

Maybe because both of these proggys allow you to 'capture' (transfer if you prefer) DV directly to an avi file.

@Memo_182, you say

I'm trying to capture a movie through my DV camera

Its the use of the word through that confuses me. Are you using the analog pass through on your camera, or is it something already recorded on mini DV tape.

In anycase, take Richard_G's advice about checking your system set up.

[tomahan]

I had a similar problem of dropping frames during capture. The problem turned out to be my firewire card was sharing an IRQ with another device. So I played musical PCI cards and exchanged slots with my firewire, soundcard, and modem. With this, Windows reinstalled each of these cards and the result was my firewire card was assigned its own IRQ. From that point, I no longer had dropped frames. So if none of the other recommended fixes solve your problem, check to see if your firewire card is sharing an IRQ with another device. If it is, then I would recommend trying my fix. It not, then my fix probably wouldn't help.

[JimJohnD]

You might give WinDV a try at https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=285

Main features:
1. small & handy <100kB one-file WinDV.exe
2. input / output - capturing from DV device to AVI files (both type-1 and type-2 supported) and recording vice versa
3. no dropped frames - memory buffering
4. automatic AVI splitting according to the timestamps on DV recordings - every video sequence can be saved into unique file
easy AVI joining - record multiple files joined to the DV device just using wildcards
5. preview of transmitted video in the window
6. free - you can download it and use it as you like at no cost