Clearing things up with Windows Task Manager

[bennetts]

I remember when I used to create my movies with Ulead Video Studio 4 I would have to ALT+CNTL+DEL to get to my Task Manager using Windows 98 and close everything out but explorer. This is so that I would not have anything taking up alot of my system resources. The guy from Ulead told me to do that with my projects with UVS8 because I am having some difficulty keeping my video and audio lined up after about 40 minutes. I am now using XP and there are about 37 processes going on and when I tried to delete them (like I did in Windows 98) I was successful with a few but many others would not let me and the last one I tried caused my computer to shut down. I don't want to do that again. Does anyone else have to do this when they are getting ready to burn a DVD?
If you know of a better way please help.

AMD 3000+
512MB RAM
160GB Hard Disk
Windows XP Home
Ulead Video Studio 8

[timmyp]

IMO, you have plenty of processing power to convert video with no problem (assuming you're not trying to defrag or do a virus scan or something while you're doing it). It's true you shouldn't have a bunch of additional programs running while converting video, but my guess is that addressing that fact alone will not resolve your problem.

However, regarding services running in WinXP, it works differently than Win98 in the respect that WinXP shows you all (or nearly all) of the processes running on your machine whereas Win98 hid a lot of those things.

A good site to learn about WinXP services, what they do, and which you can turn off, is www.blackviper.com.

Regarding your sync issues, what is your source material? What is your process? Maybe we can help pinpoint the cause of the problem.

[Vanster]

Try this program to close all your running applications. It will save you a lot of time. It is a free shareware program.

http://home.ptd.net/~don5408/toolbox/enditall/

[chicola]

One of the best:

WinTasks 5 - http://www.liutilities.com/products/trial/

To see what each Windows task is all about:

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

[daamon]

Try this program to close all your running applications. It will save you a lot of time. It is a free shareware program.

http://home.ptd.net/~don5408/toolbox/enditall/

Having followed this link, I found a "problem" downloading it. However, a little bit of delving in Google revealed:

http://www.infopackets.com/gazette/20040729.htm - Do a Ctrl+F to find "enditall".

[bennetts]

Let me tell you all what my project is. I am converting all my home movies that I have taken on my old Sony 8mm video camera onto DVD. I am using my Sony Digital8 camera to play them back on and send it to the computer via 1394 wire using Ulead Video Studio 8 to capture, edit, and burn my projects.
This is the process that I go through:
I close Outlook and disable my Norton Antivirus program. I then open Zone Alarm and stop all internet traffic and turn off the screensaver.
I connect the camera and capture the video using the default DV AVI Type 2 capture settings. I edit and save the file using the original video avi settings. I clean out the timeline and then open up the avi file when I am in the buring DVD process. I am using Kypermedia 4X DVD+R disks (I have an HP DVD+R burner - I wish I had a multiple format burner). Ulead converts the avi file to MPEG2 (I use 720x480 @ 8000 variable kbps, lower field first). I have already made 13 home DVDs and I notice the delay in audio to video in only a couple. It seems to get worse when the video is about an hour or more.

Thanks for your quick reply.

PS: I have downloaded EndItAll and I will need to spend some time with it.

[redwudz]

It would be unusual that a Firewire transfer would be affected by processes, internet or antivirus. It's the same as transfering a file from one drive to the other. Have you tried DVIO or WINDV to see if they exibit the same problem?

Does the DV file have the sync problem or is it only after encoding to MPEG2? Or editing? Or after burning?

I have had similar DV sync problems with long DV transfers (6 hours) and I traced it down to scene changes and dropouts on the video tape. You might try transfering a long video from another device to see if it exibits the same problem.

[daamon]

Hi bennetts,

Although I was just posting because I found where "EndItAll" could be found, I've since read your posts and have the feeling that, with your system setup and your approach, it's not an issue relating to any processes running in the background.

I've regularly captured (transferred), edited, encoded and authored on my PC (hover over my "Computer Details") without killing any background processes and I have anti-virus, firewall, pop-up blockers, anti-spyware, scanner and other processes running. The only one I turn off is the screensaver.

I capture and edit with Adobe Premiere. I then frameserve to encode with TMPGEnc and author with TMPGEnc DVD Author and have never had any problems.

When you said "the guy from Ulead told me to do that with my projects with UVS8 because I am having some difficulty keeping my video and audio lined up after about 40 minutes", I'd say he was shooting in the dark and didn't really know what he was talking about (IMO).

So, my guess would be that it could be with your software rather than hardware or process. I'm not slating Ulead, but I'd be surprised if it was hardware.

Try reviewing the footage at each stage to see if you can pin down where it's going wrong. i.e.

1. Watch / listen to the captured DV AVI (type 2 is the correct type).
2. Watch the edited AVI.
3. If possible, see if you can find the file.mpg that Ulead encodes the AVI to (don't know how Ulead works, so this may not be possible) and review that.
4. Burn to a re-writeable to save making coasters and review the finished article.

This will help narrow down where the problem lies and people may be able to help more.

Good luck...

[thecoalman]

This shouldn't make a difference but try capping in DV-1. There's no difference in between DV-1 and DV-2 except how the audio is stored. Whatever the case is I doubt it's a hardware problem.

DV-1 is preferable anyway, it produces a smaller file. The only reason I can think of for using DV-2 is some editors won't import DV-1.

[bennetts]

I guess the next thing that I need to try and do is do another capture but do it in DV AVI Type 1 instead of Type 2. Investing in RW disks might be a good thing to do.

When I save my edited avi file and play it back the audio and video are fine. One thing that I have not tried is to save it as an MPEG2 file and then watch it. I always load the edited avi file and let Ulead convert it to MPEG2 file right before the burning process. So the only MPEG2 file that I see is the one on the DVD.

Thanks for your help. Please give me more advise on this.

Steve

[northcat_8]

you should check out

www.videoguys.com
www.mikeshaw.co.uk (I think)
www.mrbass.org

You can check my system specs, but I tweaked my desktop to the gills for working with video and have never had sync problems. I can't remember what site I got my tweaks from but I think it was mike shaw's.

Page file was by far the tweak that gave me the most improvement.

I just skimmed the posts so if this has already been answered just ignore me.

Right click your clock to find your task manager, you can shut down everything in there, if it essential to windows' operation then windows will restart it automatically. Just don't shut down "explorer.exe"