Dropping Frames

[Steverup]

I have an external Western Digital Drive 250 GB formated for FAT32. I am trying to capture cleanly DV video from a camcorder to this drive using Premiere 6.0 . Everytime I try to capture over 2-3 minutes of video, it drops frames. Frustrating to say the least. I have contacted WD, but they are not much help and I am starting to wonder if the drive is simnply a poor drive or because it is formated in FAT 32 rather than NTFS. I purchased this drive specificallyt to capture video too, but eh dropping frames is making it impossible.

Any solutions? Also, can anyone recommend a very stable external drive for video capture?

Thanks,
Steve

[lordsmurf]

FAT32 doesn't help.
Do you have WinNT/2000/XP ?

And then is this the same drive as the OS is on?
Or a second hard drive?

Finally, Premiere sucks for DV transfer.
Transfer all the files over with WinDV.
Then import the DV AVI into Premiere later on.
Premiere is fine for editing, I use it too.

[Steverup]

I am using Win XP.

I have an internal C drive at 60GB and the external one at 250GB. The external is connected via firewire.

Should this external drive ne NTFS rather than FAT 32 - is the reason for the frame drops?

Steve

[Nelson37]

External drives are typically unable to maintain the very high, SUSTAINED data rate necessary to capture video without dropping frames. There is virtually no other PC operation a home user would perform, and very few in even major corporations, which require such a very high, SUSTAINED data rate.

NTFS or FAT32 would have very little effect on HD performance. Possible the Firewire card could be optimized for larger cluster sizes, but unlikely this would have any significant performance factor.

Note the emphasis on sustained data rate. Unlike software moving data, the flow of a video capture cannot be interrupted or even briefly slowed, or dropped frames will result. This is no form of defect in the drive, typically OS requirements and/or CPU usage, both of which often affect external drives. Except SCSI. Firewire is the next best option.

The recommendation would be an internal drive. Have you read the very extensive, detailed sticky on "why does my system drop frames" ?

[edDV]

See my comments in this thread earlier today.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=276315&highlight=

If you first capture to the internal drive, you can move the file to the external drive and it should work ok for editing and encoding.