Help with HuffyUV

[GaryAllegra]

I have a Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture board.
Up till recently I have only been able to capture at 320 x 240 with no dropped frames. I have tried numerous capture programs such as AVI_IO.
Since my OS is Windows XP someone suggested I try iuVCR. So far it seems to work best. I can capture at "full" which is 640x480. But after about 20 seconds I start to drop about 4 frames per second. Also the files size is about 1 GB per minute! I was told to use the HuffyUV codec. This solves all my capture problems but the AVI file is unusable. It works with Media Player but when I try to edit it in Pinnacle Studio 7 the program crashes. I also tried Dazzle Main Actor (another program I happen to have from buying the Dazzle DV Bridge). It opens the file but only the audio plays - the video is a black screen. Any help would be appreciated.
Please don't suggest I try Premiere or another editing program. Besides the cost, I have spent countless hours getting a capturing - editing - MPEG-2 encoding - authoring - burning system together. I'm afraid if I change something as major as my editing program I'm going to have to start over.
Does anyone know of a solution? I've tried all the settings in Huffy I can think of. Am I missing something? If not, is there another good codec out there that will capture compressed avi?

[GaryAllegra]

I forgot to mention that I'm pretty sure it's not a problem with my system. My Dazzle D/V Bridge can capture 720x480 with no problem. I'm not looking for advise on how to capture with no dropped frames. It seems that an avi codec like HuffyUV will do that for me. I just need some help with compatibility.
Thanx

[TheInformer]

Gary:
Try VirtualDub again to do your capturing (with HuffYUV codec), but make sure you turn off preview while capturing. When in the capture part of the program, look under the menus for an option to turn off preview.

Also, there's really no need to capture at 640x480 if you are capturing from VHS or TV... 352x480 works just as well IMHO and the resulting file sizes are smaller.

[Balthazar]

Gary:
Try VirtualDub again to do your capturing (with HuffYUV codec), but make sure you turn off preview while capturing. When in the capture part of the program, look under the menus for an option to turn off preview.

That doesn't work for him because he's using winXP. You can only do that in win98-2000 which uses VfW-drivers. Gary, stick with capturing in iuvcr and edit your files with Virtualdub. Avi-Huffyuv-files behaves strange for me in the mediaplayer (weird sound/videosync) but vdub can handle it, promise.

[Balthazar]

PS. Gary, I read your post again and I would like to add a few things. First of all, you should learn how to use virtualdub. Its very easy, its free, it wont screw anything up in your system + its only about 1MB in size.
If you want to use Pinnacle Studio 7 i guess you can do any of the following:
1. open your huffyuv-compressed avi-file in vdub and save it again as an uncompressed avi-file (ie no compression). Then you will get a big file just like the one you tried to capture before you tried huffyuv. Of course for this you need some extra GB space on your HD... :) But since the capturing is already done you will not get any dropped frames at least.

2. this one im not so sure it will work but anyway.. Frameserve from vdub to Pinnacle Studio 7.

[GaryAllegra]

Thanks for the advice! Going to VDub with the Huffy compressed avi file and out of VDub with uncompressed fits my workflow well. I will be clipping out most of the capture anyway so file size out will not be an issue. I can then go to Studio 7 to add fades and transitions. Will test for compatibility and qulaity issues and let you know.

[GaryAllegra]

It worked
The only glitch was after editing in Studio 7 I used TMGEnc to encode to MPEG-2 and since it was an analog capture I had to change the field order from bottom to top to prevent jerky video during fast motion.
Thanks Again!