I have a Panasonic NV-DS28 camcorder which is giving me a bit of grief lately.
I'm using it's DV out cable to my firewire capture card to dub material as AVI.
I'm now getting random audio dropouts of 1 frame during the process. I thought
my PC might be the cause so I lent the camera to a friend to test on his system,
as he edits digital video for a living. The same thing happened to him -- random
audio dropouts. These dropouts occur maybe once a minute -- not constantly.

I then exchanged the camera for a new one (still fairly new) and the new one is
now doing the same thing. I'm capturing to an NTFS-formatted 16 GB drive which
is 5400 rpm. The drive is freshly formatted before capture (quick format, not
full). The capture software I'm using is http://mcarr.eecs.umich.edu/dvio/ but
it doesn't report any dropped frames during capture, even though the audio does
drop out. I've also tried http://www.nct.ch/multimedia/avi_io/ and the same thing
happens with that. I'm using Windows 2000 Pro, 512 MB RAM, PIII @ 667 mhz.

So what could be the cause? No dropped frames... happens on 2 different PCs... no
disk fragmentation (fresh format)... I'm truly puzzled. Speed of the drive? I've
been told 5400 rpm is sufficient, and that if it wasn't then dropped frames would
be the symptoms (ie. reported as dropped by either of the software above). Anyone
got any suggestions?