Jumpy playback, dropped frames during capture, CPU pegged to 100%

[tylerz]

Hi folks. First post to the forums. Lot's of good info - in fact a bit too much for me to pore over so I thought I'd just post and see what happens.

I'm frustrated with the performance of video on my system. The avi files my digicams capture play back on every player all jumpy and with hesitant sound and playback - all the while with my CPU pegged at 100%

When attempting to capture digital video from my mini DV camera, I get about 5% frame droppage - and poor playback/sample quality from Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0

Here's my system specs:
Win XP SP2
2.0 GB RAM
2.5 GHz AMD Athlon 64 single processor
250 GB Hard Drive
ATi Radeon 9550
I'm running Norton Internet Security '07

Here's what I've done:

I defragged my hard drive
I downloaded gSpot and confirmed that the appropriate codecs are in place
I've opened my O/S in diagnostic mode and disabled everything but the bare necessitites

Regardless - the video is jumpy, skips, and is unusable. Happens regardless of the player - WMP, RealPlayer, QuickTime, and the player embedded in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements.

Any ideas or links to other discussions? I'm not the most techno savvy person, but with good instructions, I can likely do quite a bit -

Regards, and my gratitude in advance.

Tyler

[jagabo]

Your computer should have no problems capturing DV. Read this:

"Why does your system drop frames?"

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic157660.html

[tylerz]

jagabo - thanks for the reply

as for Symantec - before I came to VideoHelp I disabled everything I could figure out how to disable and it didn't help me

as for DMA - help me out here - what does that mean and how cna I check it?

[jagabo]

I updated my post. See item #10 in the linked thread.

[dcsos]

if you're capturing to a internal windows os hard drive, try a external drive for a a test.


If you're already using an external firewire or usb2.0 drive for captures, do a test switch to the internal drive. or another internal drive 7200pm.


If you don't own a external drive, best results with a working system uses a drive other than the internal OS DRIVE

[redwudz]

Try disabling Norton Internet Security '07 and see if that helps. You can unplug from the internet to be safe. I don't know if Norton fixed that, but what you describe is one reason I dropped the program.

And as jagabo, mentioned, check the PIO/DMA settings on your drives:

To check DMA/PIO mode within Windows:

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

From there, right click on one of the channels and choose 'Properties>Advanced Settings'. All drives should be DMA mode. The 'Current Transfer Mode' for Hard drives is usually DMA 4-6 and DVD burners DMA 2-4, DVD ROMs usually DMA 2. If you see any in PIO mode, that can slow things down.

Changing them back may be easy or complicated. First see if you can change them in that window. If not, I usually uninstall the channel the drive is on and let the OS reinstall it. This will usually take a reboot. This will not damage any files on the computer.

And welcome to our forums.

[edDV]

I agree that what you have should work and that a second drive should get best results for capture.

You didn't say but you are using an IEEE-1394 connection to the camcorder right? Try WinDV. Its more efficient for system resource use than Premiere Elements. Once the DV-AVI file is created, it can be imported into Elements.

[bufalo]

Here's what I learned along the way:

use a seperate drive for video
defrag both drives constantly
KILL all unnecessary processes
turn off Norton (hard to do, I got rid of it altogether)
after you capture, unplug your camera from your computer


Hope this helps