Formac TVR

[From a Buick 8]

I am tying to use a Formac TV to transfer some old VHS-C tapes to DVD. I can live with the poor picture quality but it keeps dropping frames. I have a G4 1.2 with a gig of ram running OS 10.3

The Formac is older and i have to use Vidi to get the .DV files on my hard drive.

[Frobozz]

I don't have a Formac. However, one thing to try is anything that will keep the unit from getting hot. My brother had a different brand of capture device that he put in the freezer prior to using. That made it work for short captures before frames started dropping. He ultimately contributed the unit to his local landfill.

[mhar4]

I have used this device, and although I haven't found heat an issue, because it's a generic DV capture device it pumps out data pretty fast and needs a tip-top hard drive to work at its best, ideal would be a second internal drive. I have used an external FW drive (although the order of devices along a firewire chain seems to be important) If you have to run everything off one drive, you could try repairing permissions and running the optimizing scripts with Onyx or similar to minimize unnecessary drive head activity.