Recommended System Requirements for Capturing?

[deedub666]

Hello,

I posted once before regarding blocks (or artifacts) that I get when capturing video from my Sony DV Camera using WinDV.

Can you give me feedback as to what you believe are recommended system requirements for capturing video? I know a firewire card is a must but I'm curious about CPU speed, RAM, free HD space and whatever else comes to mind.

Thanks,

D.W.

[Tommyknocker]

If you are using the computer in your details, it is faster than mine and I transfer DV to my computer all the time.

[guns1inger]

I used to capture DV and analogue ona celeron 500 with 768MB ram. I would recommend adding 512MB to what you have to allow for a large buffer, otherwise you should be fine

[MpegEncoder]

Also make sure that you have as few other programs running "in the background" as possible. They can sometimes hog some CPU time and cause dropouts.

[deedub666]

Thanks peeps, I followed your suggestions. I captured video with my camera on a friend's computer. His computer is nearly the same as mine except he has WinXP and 512MB of RAM vs. I have Win2000 and 256MB of RAM. Using his firewire cable and WinDV, I captured some test video and it came out perfect on his machine. Back on mine I'm still getting one garbled frame per minute.

So at this point I know it's not my camera, not the tape, not my firewire cable nor WinDV causing the problem. (I also killed off as many processes as possible when capturing on mine; I had maybe 20 processes running in total.)

I'm thinking the culprit could be my firewire card? I guess I'm gonna buy another one and test. I'm assuming capture should be straight forward on my Win2000 with 256 megs of RAM.

I'll post my results but am always glad to hear more feedback about the above.

D.W.

[deedub666]

Turns out my firewire card was junk. I had bought a USB 2.0 / Firewire combo card from some dude on ebay and shows you get what you pay for, especially when it comes directly from China. The card was a VIA vt6306 / vt6212L card so buyer beware.

I capture perfectly now with my $13 firewire card from Frys.
Sorry for my own personal blog but your suggestions helped in my direction.

D.W.