Is my PC up to capturing from my camcorder?

[alhenderson]

Morning All,

Found this site yesterday and was hoping for some advice about capturing from my camcorder and burning to DVD. I tried this for the forst time on Sunday and the result was dreadful, frames were being skipped all over the place and the audio was way out of synch. I read the FAQ yesterday and tried a few things like turning off AVG Resident Shield, unplugging my PC from the network and cleaning out some disk space. The results were an improvement, but still not really watchable. I still have frames being skipped, although not nearly as many, and the picture looks very blocky especially when the subject is moving.

Before I get carried away trying all sorts of tricks, can anyone tell me if my machine is even up to the job? Spec is below:

P4 1.6Ghz
1.25Gb RAM
60Gb HD (9Gb free)
NVIDIA GeForce 100/200 graphics card (not sure of the memory on it)
On board sound

I was using DVD Santa to capture and burn the DVD. I defragged my HD last night after my latest attempt, but it wasn't particularly badly fragmented anyway, so I'm not sure that's going to help. I know that onboard sound is a bad plan, and I could probably get a cheapo sound card and whack that in (will any old one do, or is there a minimum spec?), but will that help with dropped frames etc? I can also try and clear out some more disk space.

Can anyone recommend any other software to use? I only chose DVD Santa because I came across it and downloaded the demo copy.

Thanks for any tips/hints etc.

Al.

[guns1inger]

DVD Santa is probably not the main cause of your problems, but it certainly isn't helping. I put it high on my list of programs most likely to bring someone here looking for help.

You have several different problems, so you probably need to work on a couple of areas.

First question to you though - what are you capturing from, and with what hardware ?

The most reliable capture method is DV (IEE1394, Firewire, iLink), and I have been able to capture and work with DV on much slower machines than yours.

You need to get a second drive. Your current dive is simply to full to be reliable, and if you do capture using DV then you will get around 40 minutes of footage before you are out of space completely. A second drive will also reduce the instances of dropped frames because you won't be competing with the OS for the only available HDD.

The other advantage to DV is that you don't have to encode as you capture. Your system simply is not fast enough to capture with any quality if it has to encode as well. The blockiness you are seeing is a classic symptom of too much compression being applied.

If you can answer the first question, then we can recommend better software. DV transfer can be done with something small and simple, such as WinDV. The low overhead also helps reduce frame dropping.

[alhenderson]

I was so caught up in the other details, forgot to mention that I'm using Firewire from my Canon miniDV camcorder. I do have an external USB hard drive which has masses of space available (100+ Gb), but I was reluctant to use that as its connected with USB which I thought would be slower. Should I use that?

I was using DVDSanata because it seemed to be able to do the encoding and the burning, but I have no problem with using two different packages if its going to get me better results.

Thanks,
Al.

[guns1inger]

If your USB drive is connected via USB2 then you should be able to transfer directly to it. It's not quite as good as an internal drive, but it should be OK if nothing else is going on. Use WinDV to transfer the footage from the camera to the drive, then you can edit and encode to your heart's content. I would suggest FAVC or DVD Flick for encoding and authoring to DVD. All of this free, and far better in quality than DVD Santa.

[edDV]

I was so caught up in the other details, forgot to mention that I'm using Firewire from my Canon miniDV camcorder. I do have an external USB hard drive which has masses of space available (100+ Gb), but I was reluctant to use that as its connected with USB which I thought would be slower. Should I use that?

I was using DVDSanata because it seemed to be able to do the encoding and the burning, but I have no problem with using two different packages if its going to get me better results.

Thanks,
Al.

My first firewire DV capture was to a 300MHz PII so your machine is adequate. You shouldn't attempt encoding on the fly, just transfer the DV intact with WinDV. It will still be first generation.

Best configuration is separate internal drives; one for OS and the second for video capture. It should be possible to cap to the single internal drive (defrag first) and it should also be possible to the USB2 drive but more things can go wrong with USB. Make sure all other applications and background programs are disabled. Watch the WinDV control panel for frame drop warnings.

After capture, you can freely copy to the USB2 drive or play without fear of drops. The OS manages packet transfer in that case.

[alhenderson]

Aha - so part of my problem is that DVD Santa is capturing the video and encoding it at the same time? I'm better off capturing and then encoding? Excellent, I'll give those a try tonight. Will be a relief, I assured the good lady wife that it would all be fine when I got rid of the VCR last week and that we should be putting all our home videos on DVD anyway

Thanks for all your help, everyone, much appreciated!

Al.

[edDV]

Yes capture, then edit/encode. Capture must be real time. Encoding can proceed more slowly for better quality. Camcorder video should be encoded at high DVD bit rate e.g. >8Mb/s CBR or VBR (average). If you encode audio to MP2 or AC3, video bit rates above 9Mb/s can be used.

[alhenderson]

OK, I have used WinDV to capture the video and DVD Flick to encode/burn the video. The result was massively better, the audio and video in synch but I still have blockiness around quick movements on the screen. Is this likely to be the encoding process or the capture that has done this? I used the 'Normal' encoding profile in DVD Flick, perhaps I should have used Best?

Thanks,
Al.

[guns1inger]

Try best. The best results will come when you learn about bitrates, how to manually set up an encoder, and how to use a bitrate calculator. Also, handheld DV is one of the hardest to work with because it is everything mpeg-2 encoders hate - lots of movement, often whole-of-frame changes to lighting and exposure - very difficult to encode.

[edDV]

Always start with best (>8Mb/s) then try the next down and judge degradation.

[alhenderson]

Hello Again,

I tried the encoding again last night with my small fragment of video, this time using the best encoding profile and a sample rate of 8Mb/s. Didn't mak any difference to the output - when I watch the DVD there is still noticeable blockiness around some of the movement. Its not there when I watch it back on the camcorder, but it is there when I view the AVI file created by WinDV throught Windows Media Player. That would suggest to me that the problem was in the capture, but there are no settings in WinDV to increase quality or anything like that, so I'm not sure what to do about it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Al.

[edDV]

Hello Again,

I tried the encoding again last night with my small fragment of video, this time using the best encoding profile and a sample rate of 8Mb/s. Didn't mak any difference to the output - when I watch the DVD there is still noticeable blockiness around some of the movement. Its not there when I watch it back on the camcorder, but it is there when I view the AVI file created by WinDV throught Windows Media Player. That would suggest to me that the problem was in the capture, but there are no settings in WinDV to increase quality or anything like that, so I'm not sure what to do about it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Al.

The DV-AVI file captured by WinDV is bit for bit identical to the data on MiniDV tape. To prove this you can transfer the same data back to a blank tape and play for comparison.

The problem must be with your computer player. Instead try the VLC player and set Video Deinterlace to linear or mean.

The MPeg2 encoder quality may be an issue. Evaluate with the VLC player and the same deinterlace settings.

[alhenderson]

Hello Again,

I tried the encoding again last night with my small fragment of video, this time using the best encoding profile and a sample rate of 8Mb/s. Didn't mak any difference to the output - when I watch the DVD there is still noticeable blockiness around some of the movement. Its not there when I watch it back on the camcorder, but it is there when I view the AVI file created by WinDV throught Windows Media Player. That would suggest to me that the problem was in the capture, but there are no settings in WinDV to increase quality or anything like that, so I'm not sure what to do about it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Al.

The DV-AVI file captured by WinDV is bit for bit identical to the data on MiniDV tape. To prove this you can transfer the same data back to a blank tape and play for comparison.

The problem must be with your computer player. Instead try the VLC player and set Video Deinterlace to linear or mean.

They MPeg2 encoder quality may be an issue. Evaluate with the VLC player and the same deinterlace settings.

I thought that the capture from WinDV was supposed to be identical. I will try VLC and see what happens. If I use VLC and the blockiness is not there, then I guess it is the encoding that is the problem. Which begs the question - what can I do about it? I had the profile set to Best last night, is there anything else worth tweaking?

Thanks,
Al.

[alhenderson]

I viewed my AVI using VLC, and the blockiness was still very visible. I got to thinking that maybe it was a worn out tape (I've only ever used the one - although not very often, maybe 4 or 5 times). So, I recaptured with WinDV (after unplugging my ethernet cable) and all is well. Would some sort of interference or load on the PC caused by the ethernet have caused the blockiness? Or was I just luck the second time round?

Well, I'm going to capture the whole tape (once I've unplugged the ethernet again) and see how I get on...

Thanks,
Al.

[edDV]

I viewed my AVI using VLC, and the blockiness was still very visible. I got to thinking that maybe it was a worn out tape (I've only ever used the one - although not very often, maybe 4 or 5 times). So, I recaptured with WinDV (after unplugging my ethernet cable) and all is well. Would some sort of interference or load on the PC caused by the ethernet have caused the blockiness? Or was I just luck the second time round?

Well, I'm going to capture the whole tape (once I've unplugged the ethernet again) and see how I get on...

Thanks,
Al.

Can you make a screen cap of the "blockiness" and post it here ? VLC will do it (under Video tab "Snapshot").

It may be dirty heads or worn tape but that would show if you played from the camcorder directly to a TV

[alhenderson]

I viewed my AVI using VLC, and the blockiness was still very visible. I got to thinking that maybe it was a worn out tape (I've only ever used the one - although not very often, maybe 4 or 5 times). So, I recaptured with WinDV (after unplugging my ethernet cable) and all is well. Would some sort of interference or load on the PC caused by the ethernet have caused the blockiness? Or was I just luck the second time round?

Well, I'm going to capture the whole tape (once I've unplugged the ethernet again) and see how I get on...

Thanks,
Al.

Can you make a screen cap of the "blockiness" and post it here ? VLC will do it (under Video tab "Snapshot").

It may be dirty heads or worn tape but that would show if you played from the camcorder directly to a TV

Hope this works..



This is from the latest capture I did when I tried to get the whole tape. Didn't get it, ran out of disk space on the drive. I haven't looked at it all, but the quality doesn't look very good. Maybe due to the lack of disk space?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Al.

[edDV]

That looks like dirty heads or worn tape "dropouts". You should be able to see these on a direct feed from the camcorder to the TV. It might be possible these occur on the firewire transfer but much less likely.

1. First try a cleaning tape.

2. Try to play the tape in another camcorder to a TV to see if dropouts follow the tape.


PS: The line splits are normal interlace. The player will deinterlacer will deal with the lines. You seem to be showing the VLC default to "Disable" = no-deinterlace.

[edDV]

The blocks you are seeing are the 16x16 pixel macro blocks that can't be corrected by the camcorder's dropout compensator. Another camcorder might do better.



You can see the dropout compensator working to the 8x8 block level in the greenish macro blocks above the white one.

[alhenderson]

That looks like dirty heads or worn tape "dropouts". You should be able to see these on a direct feed from the camcorder to the TV. It might be possible these occur on the firewire transfer but much less likely.

1. First try a cleaning tape.

2. Try to play the tape in another camcorder to a TV to see if dropouts follow the tape.


PS: The line splits are normal interlace. The player will deinterlacer will deal with the lines. You seem to be showing the VLC default to "Disable" = no-deinterlace.

You're right - for that capture, I was showing it with defaults, I need try with de-interlace set to Mean as you suggested, but it didn't make any difference. Unfortunately, the only way I have of seeing the output from the camcorder on the TV is through the video which is in the loft I can't see the blocks on the camcorder screen, but it is a small screen. I will see if I can get hold of something at the weekend to allow me to play back the camcorder directly to the scart on the TV, think I used to have some kind of adapter which took the 3 plugs from the camcorder lead and pugged into a SCART socket.

I don't think its the tape, though, as I managed one capture of the sequence without any of the blockiness. I don't suppose that rules out the heads on the camcorder, though..

Thanks for your help - hopefully I'll get to the bottom of this!

Al.

[alhenderson]

Hello Again,

Over the weekend I have done two things. Firstly, bought a SCART adapter that allows me to playback to the telly from the camcorder. When I do this, there is no sign of the blockiness that I see when I capture via Firewire, the picture is absolutely fine.

Second, I got a head cleaning tape for the camcorder and ran that through, just to be sure. Its made no difference whatsoever - when I capture, either using Windows Movie Maker, or WinDV, I get this "blockiness" around any movement. So, it would appear to be something wrong in the firewire capture... Is this common, or at least possible? I haven't got the most expensive firwire card in the world - its a Belkin, but should still be OK, I would have thought. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone else with a firewire card that I can test this theory out with.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might cause such a thing to happen on the firewire transfer? Could it get interference from other cards etc in the PC? Wouldn't have thought so, but you never know, I guess..

Thanks for any thoughts,

Al.

[edDV]

Hello Again,

Over the weekend I have done two things. Firstly, bought a SCART adapter that allows me to playback to the telly from the camcorder. When I do this, there is no sign of the blockiness that I see when I capture via Firewire, the picture is absolutely fine.

Second, I got a head cleaning tape for the camcorder and ran that through, just to be sure. Its made no difference whatsoever - when I capture, either using Windows Movie Maker, or WinDV, I get this "blockiness" around any movement. So, it would appear to be something wrong in the firewire capture... Is this common, or at least possible? I haven't got the most expensive firwire card in the world - its a Belkin, but should still be OK, I would have thought. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone else with a firewire card that I can test this theory out with.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might cause such a thing to happen on the firewire transfer? Could it get interference from other cards etc in the PC? Wouldn't have thought so, but you never know, I guess..

Thanks for any thoughts,

Al.

If you don't see the artifacts during camcorder playback to a TV, next step is fault isolation to the camcorder or PC. Best way to do this is attempt capture from your camcorder to a different PC with Firewire or test another known good camcorder with your PC.

DV transfer is a video+audio data stream, not a networked file transfer. Data is streamed to the tape while recording with each frame of data identified with time code. During playback the stream is directed from tape to the firewire interface.

At the PC end data enters the PC at a constant rate of about 28Mb/s. It is minimally hardware buffered in the firewire card and passed to the PCI bus. A desktop PC with multiple hard drives can operate under a process known as bus mastering. Bus mastering allows data to flow from the IEEE-1394 Firewire card, through dedicated memory to a second hard disk controller separated from disk activity on the OS drive. This provides a reliable data path to the hard disk where the data stream is captured to a DV-AVI file.

Laptop computers and desktops with a single hard drive cannot take advantage of PCI Bus Mastering. Instead, the OS shares the stream capture process with other OS and application processes. The capture drive also must contend with OS generated disk tasks that may cause DV buffer memory to overflow thus causing data gaps in the DV-AVI file. A simple way to test if this is the case is to transfer the contents of the DV-AVI file back to the camcorder with the WinDV application then test camcorder playback of that data to the TV. If you see the errors, then the firewire to disk path is faulty. If you see no problem with camcorder playback, then the artifacts are being caused by the way you are playing the DV-AVI file at the PC.

The reason DV capture to an external USB2 drive is even more risky than capture to the single internal drive is the USB disk controller is a moderate CPU intensive software process that needs to operate continuously during the transfer. Any other OS or application processes can cause interruption of data flow to the external USB2 drive.

[alhenderson]

Hello Again,

Over the weekend I have done two things. Firstly, bought a SCART adapter that allows me to playback to the telly from the camcorder. When I do this, there is no sign of the blockiness that I see when I capture via Firewire, the picture is absolutely fine.

Second, I got a head cleaning tape for the camcorder and ran that through, just to be sure. Its made no difference whatsoever - when I capture, either using Windows Movie Maker, or WinDV, I get this "blockiness" around any movement. So, it would appear to be something wrong in the firewire capture... Is this common, or at least possible? I haven't got the most expensive firwire card in the world - its a Belkin, but should still be OK, I would have thought. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone else with a firewire card that I can test this theory out with.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might cause such a thing to happen on the firewire transfer? Could it get interference from other cards etc in the PC? Wouldn't have thought so, but you never know, I guess..

Thanks for any thoughts,

Al.

If you don't see the artifacts during camcorder playback to a TV, next step is fault isolation to the camcorder or PC. Best way to do this is attempt capture from your camcorder to a different PC with Firewire or test another known good camcorder with your PC.

DV transfer is a video+audio data stream, not a networked file transfer. Data is streamed to the tape while recording with each frame of data identified with time code. During playback the stream is directed from tape to the firewire interface.

At the PC end data enters the PC at a constant rate of about 28Mb/s. It is minimally hardware buffered in the firewire card and passed to the PCI bus. A desktop PC with multiple hard drives can operate under a process known as bus mastering. Bus mastering allows data to flow from the IEEE-1394 Firewire card, through dedicated memory to a second hard disk controller separated from disk activity on the OS drive. This provides a reliable data path to the hard disk where the data stream is captured to a DV-AVI file.

Laptop computers and desktops with a single hard drive cannot take advantage of PCI Bus Mastering. Instead, the OS shares the stream capture process with other OS and application processes. The capture drive also must contend with OS generated disk tasks that may cause DV buffer memory to overflow thus causing data gaps in the DV-AVI file. A simple way to test if this is the case is to transfer the contents of the DV-AVI file back to the camcorder with the WinDV application then test camcorder playback of that data to the TV. If you see the errors, then the firewire to disk path is faulty. If you see no problem with camcorder playback, then the artifacts are being caused by the way you are playing the DV-AVI file at the PC.

The reason DV capture to an external USB2 drive is even more risky than capture to the single internal drive is the USB disk controller is a moderate CPU intensive software process that needs to operate continuously during the transfer. Any other OS or application processes can cause interruption of data flow to the external USB2 drive.

Thanks for all your help on here with this, I thought this was going to be straightforward I am asking around to see if I can find someone else with a firewire card so I can capture on their PC and see what happens. As you say, I will also try to write back the AVI file to the camcorder and see if I can work out where the fault lies. My desktop PC has a single hard drive, and it only has about 10Gb free, so in the long term I think its not going to be much use for capturing an hours worth of camcorder tape - a new one may become a necessity anyway.

Thanks,
Al.

[edDV]

Hard disk fragmentation can also be a cause. The memory buffer may overflow while the single disk seeks empty sectors.

I suggest you move some disk content to the external USB2 drive to make room for capture on the C: disk. Then defragment the C: disk.

A second internal capture drive is the better option.

[alhenderson]

I think that a second internal hard drive is going to be the best option as once I suss the basics of how to do this, I'm going to want to have enough space to capture an entire hour long tape in one go and burn to DVD with minimal fuss. Much as I'd love to, I don't think I'm going to get the time to do any clever editting etc. You talked about bus mastering in your previous post - is there anything I need to do to make this happen? Does the new internal drive need to be set up in any special way? I suspect if I install it normally it would end up as a slave to the main OS disk - is this suitable?

Thanks again,
Al.

One more question regarding the spec of the disk - I found a "Samsung SpinPoint 320GB 7200RPM S300 8MB" (dabs.com) disk going fairly cheap - would this do the job, or do I need something better?

[edDV]

Bus Mastering is more or less automatic when the second drive is installed. Ideally the drive would be placed on a separate IDE or SATA controller for full isolation but just having the second drive as a slave is probably enough for DV. The drive need not be particularly fast. Anything from ATA66 up should be fine.

[alhenderson]

Hello Again,

I have borrowed a camcorder from a mate and done some capturing and the picture is perfect - no blockiness at all. So, that narrows it down to my camcorder being the problem. I bought a head cleaning tape at the weekend which I had run through for the prescribed 10 seconds, I have now done that another two times to no avail.

However, in experimenting tonight, I can see the same blockiness that I get in the capture using WinV on the screen on the camcorder, but as soon as I unplug the firewire cable it stops. So, now it looks like some kind of interference between the firewire and the camcorder. Camcorder is a Canon MV940, is it a fault with the camcorder, or is it more sensitive to something than the other one that I have borrowed (which is a panasonic)? Do I need to get shielded cabling or something, or maybe there's a fault with the camcorder? (Hope not, that sounds expensive!).

Any thoughts (again!!)??

Al.

[edDV]

Hello Again,

I have borrowed a camcorder from a mate and done some capturing and the picture is perfect - no blockiness at all. So, that narrows it down to my camcorder being the problem. I bought a head cleaning tape at the weekend which I had run through for the prescribed 10 seconds, I have now done that another two times to no avail.

However, in experimenting tonight, I can see the same blockiness that I get in the capture using WinV on the screen on the camcorder, but as soon as I unplug the firewire cable it stops. So, now it looks like some kind of interference between the firewire and the camcorder. Camcorder is a Canon MV940, is it a fault with the camcorder, or is it more sensitive to something than the other one that I have borrowed (which is a panasonic)? Do I need to get shielded cabling or something, or maybe there's a fault with the camcorder? (Hope not, that sounds expensive!).

Any thoughts (again!!)??
Al.

It seems to be a camcorder fault. A Firewire connection shouldn't affect the stream playback from tape to the viewfinder. Maybe you could ask a Canon authorized repair shop for an estimate. I'm not sure about Canon but Sony shops usually quote a flat repair fee.

[alhenderson]

Hello Again,

I have borrowed a camcorder from a mate and done some capturing and the picture is perfect - no blockiness at all. So, that narrows it down to my camcorder being the problem. I bought a head cleaning tape at the weekend which I had run through for the prescribed 10 seconds, I have now done that another two times to no avail.

However, in experimenting tonight, I can see the same blockiness that I get in the capture using WinV on the screen on the camcorder, but as soon as I unplug the firewire cable it stops. So, now it looks like some kind of interference between the firewire and the camcorder. Camcorder is a Canon MV940, is it a fault with the camcorder, or is it more sensitive to something than the other one that I have borrowed (which is a panasonic)? Do I need to get shielded cabling or something, or maybe there's a fault with the camcorder? (Hope not, that sounds expensive!).

Any thoughts (again!!)??
Al.

It seems to be a camcorder fault. A Firewire connection shouldn't affect the stream playback from tape to the viewfinder. Maybe you could ask a Canon authorized repair shop for an estimate. I'm not sure about Canon but Sony shops usually quote a flat repair fee.

I guess that's the only way to be sure - I'll try with a different firewire cable just in case - clutching at straws and all that

Thanks for all your help on this, I'll report back when I know more..

Al.

[alhenderson]

I viewed my AVI using VLC, and the blockiness was still very visible. I got to thinking that maybe it was a worn out tape (I've only ever used the one - although not very often, maybe 4 or 5 times). So, I recaptured with WinDV (after unplugging my ethernet cable) and all is well. Would some sort of interference or load on the PC caused by the ethernet have caused the blockiness? Or was I just luck the second time round?

Well, I'm going to capture the whole tape (once I've unplugged the ethernet again) and see how I get on...

Thanks,
Al.

Can you make a screen cap of the "blockiness" and post it here ? VLC will do it (under Video tab "Snapshot").

It may be dirty heads or worn tape but that would show if you played from the camcorder directly to a TV

Hope this works..



This is from the latest capture I did when I tried to get the whole tape. Didn't get it, ran out of disk space on the drive. I haven't looked at it all, but the quality doesn't look very good. Maybe due to the lack of disk space?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Al.

Resurrecting an old thread, but I thought I'd share something I discovered this morning. Turns out the interference in my video is down to the camcorder power supply. When I playback/capture using the camcorder battery, eveyrthing's fine. But as soon as I plug in the power supply, I get the blockiness described above. I had to replace the original canon power supply when it broke, and bought a cheap one rather than a Canon one, looks like I'm paying for it now Still, rather that than the camcorder being at fault.

Hope that helps someone in the future - thanks everyone for all the info in this thread.

Al.

[edDV]

Interesting that the power supply is causing this. It could be the voltage or minimum amperage do not match the original supply.

Good that it still works from battery.