Normal to lose 60 frames capturing 30 minutes?

[Raycaster]

I'm using a Maxtor G400 Marvel and trying to capture home 8mm video I've taken over the past year.

I have a Athlon 1.333GHz , 512M DDR, and 20 & 40G ATA100 7200RPM HDs.

I made a real bad decision going with the AMD instead of Intel but it's a lesson learned.

I've optimized, defragged, DMA'd , flashed, etc but still drop frames from my Sony HandCamVision (Composite only).

Here's the catch, I can capture with no lost frames TV from the Marvel. So, is it just a bad tape that the marvel looses track?

Lennard Price
(monitoring every minute of the day for new patches to put over the old patches so a AMD CPU can work reliably in the year 2001)...

[JJamez]

I normally dropped about 1-2 frames a minute until I started using XP. Its only 2 seconds out of 30 minutes, so it will most likely be unnoticeable, unless the drops are clumped together. As for normal, I don't know - just because it has happened to me, doesn't mean its normal...

I'm more curious about what kinds of problems you've been having with the AMD? I thought most of the probs were motherboard related and had been ironed out by now with BIOS updates. I love my new Duron - only thing that is a bit unnerving is that it runs really hot - avg ~50C...

JJ

[WMike]

I have drops that run very consistently at 1/6 mins. or so. I believe this is occuring to keep audio/video synch as my sound card may be a dog (new one on the way). I never notice the drops in the video.

Mike

[jdpace2]

I drop one frame every two minutes. My computer specs are at

http://www.acedeuce.net/witchbladevcd/computer.html

[Lamont Cranston]

I capture from a Sony Hi 8 S in with the ATI AIW 128 Pro and an AMD 1GHz using VirtualDub or AVI_IO and never drop a frame without an obvious reason. When I do drop a frame it is because there was a gap between scenes on the original tape. Maybe your camera has excessive image jitter. Did or can you capture with VirtualDub to see how much image jitter your camera has?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Lamont Cranston on 2001-07-08 04:04:15 ]</font>

[Raycaster]

Thanks for all the replies folks.

I've been tackling the Asus A7A266 for 2 weeks and might just now have a "somewhat" stable system. Strange things still happen but this is a Video Forum not Tech CPU...

I think a located one big problem of losing frames by removing the Asus IPanel that seemed to be "polling" info from the board interrupting video capture every 30 sec, not sure.

Now that my system seems stable can I now blame bad video for lost frames? By the above answers it looks like this might be the case. If I'm only losing 1 or 2 frames a minute does it matter for general hobby video editing? Will the lost frames "unsync" the sound etc?

Lamont, I will try VirtualDub, does it in fact indicate image jitter per film or is this a "eye" thing?

Thanks..

[Lamont Cranston]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-07-08 19:42:11, Raycaster wrote:
Lamont, I will try VirtualDub, does it in fact indicate image jitter per film or is this a "eye" thing?
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Virtualdub displays just about everything including image jitter and cpu usage. What is your capture resolution and what compression codec are you using?

[tendtend]

There are several reasons for dropping frames. For you I think it may due to (1) bad video source (uncontinuous recording) or (2) low HD speed or (3) to highh compression. Please try to use YUV9 (no compression) instead of YUV2. YUV9 actually gives you 1.8:1 compression with the option of noncompression. It works just well even with the bad video source.

[WMike]

Update:

New sound card installed (Vortex) and the drops have stopped completely. Zero drops now through a 2+ hr. movie.


Good luck
Mike

[JJamez]

What kind of card were you using before?

[NemesisEra]

I get dropped frames generally from certain Video Compressors not the processor or Video Capture Card itself. Might be the hard drive speed as well. I have a dedicated 4 gig hard drive for VCDs. Your processor is definitely not the problem, I know when I capture I use a mere 20% of CPU power on my 800Mhz, in fact you should be lucky you got AMD instead of the P4. Try using different compression agents, I PIC MJPEG Codec works well and so does HUFFYUV...its all a matter of trial and error, I know some of my VHS tapes don't work as well as others either.

Just so you know its not your computer, here are my specs.:
320Megs PC100 SDRAM
AMD Athlon 800 (SLOT A) (512K L2 Cache)
20Gig Western Digital UDMA/66
10Gig Western Digital UDMA/33
4GIG Seagate UDMA/33
TNT2 M64 (32)
WinTV-FM

Even though my computer is about mid ranged, it still doesn't drop frames. try different compressors I'm sure you'll find a working one.

[Betamax]

You think it was all done now, well it ain't !

First, for you who want to know, my configuration:
CPU : Athlon 1.2Ghz
MB using Via Chipset with 4 IDEcontrollers (1st two standard PIO en last 2 ATA100-raid - but I'm not using raid).
My capture disk (which is NOT the same at the OS-disk) is about 60Gb running at ATA100-7200rpm.
Video en capture device : ASUS-V7100combo AGP (cause I've got ViaChipset, I only can use in AGPx1 mode)
Sound : Creative SoundBlaster PCI-128bit.
--Did I forget someting?--

I tried everything, I always get lost-frames.
I cannot capture in NT4 neither in NT2000 (nt4 : a dropped frame every 2frames captured !! -- nt2k : somehow I cannot install nt2k onto my system, the install keeps failing). So capture only works in WinME.

When using the AsusLive utility (from Asus itself) I can capture without dropped frames, but for maximum 2Gb file (using its own ASV2 codec).
Otherwise, when using VDub1.4d (not using hotFix : has too much bugs!), I always have dropped frames. I tried HUFFYUV, MJPEG, asus's own codecs : always lost frames (1 for every 3 minutes for Asus, 1 for every 20seconds for HUFFYUV, 1 for every 3-5minutes with MJPEG).

Now tell me what I'm doing wrong or anyone can tell me a tip.
7 Months ago, I started capturing with the idea to archive all my VHS-tapes to (S)VCD. But now I know, it's just a fantasy. My tapes will fall to dust, without having the possibility to have them sequred to disk.

I'm desperate...

[tacosalad]

As a test, try capturing without any audio.

The Creative sound cards are notorious resource hogs, often cutting in half the bandwidth you can capture.

If you're able to capture at much higher settings without audio, it's time to suspect the sound card.

[WMike]

Listen to tacosalad.

Like I said above, my sound card was causing my drops. The new card is an Aureal Vortex SoundCom V90. It was $15 at Computer Geeks and I now haven't had a drop in all captures (about 6 two hr caps) since I installed it.

Good luck
Mike