please help...video capture problem

[brimeis]

a question to see if anyone has any ideas....the video I am capturing from has probably been dubbed 2 or 3 times before I got it - and when I am capturing the video freezes at times making for a very choppy play both in preview and playback. I was wondering if anyone knew of a way I can capture this video and have it be somewhat smooth. Most video I try to capture from works fine......

I am using:

AMD Athlon
512 MB SDRAM
DVCII Capture card
Moviestar 4.23

Sometimes playing around with the tracking has had a good result in the past and made it smoother, but unfortunately it is not working this time. It can freeze at times for 10 seconds before the screen changes. Are there any settings to make it less picky so it will capture the video? Thanks for any help that you can give.

[solarfox]

I don't know if this will help unless you have (or can borrow) this equipment, but when trying to capture marginal-quality video, I've had somewhat better results running the analog video into my Digital-8 camcorder, recording it to tape, then capturing the camcorder-tape copy through the IEEE1394 link. For whatever reason, my Sony DCR-TRV103 seems to be better at handling marginal sync signals...

If you have, or can borrow, a DV camcorder (either Digital-8 or mini-DV) and an IEEE1394 card, you might give that a shot and see what happens. You might also try using a different VCR for playback... it's a long shot, but sometimes I've come across videos which play more cleanly on an older machine than on a newer one, and sometimes vice-versa.