onboard video strong enough to capture canon hdv30??

[mcd74]

I had an old P4 2.8 with a geforce 128 mb video card and capturing hdv was no problem. Now I just got a new cpu. Amd 64 x2 dual 2.66 ghz with a single 500 gig hard drive. I don’t have a pci express card for video, I am still using the onboard video on the motherboard. I don’t know much about it other then its nvidia with 512 memory. When I now try to capture with pinnacle 11 it starts capturing fine but after a minute or so in the preview box that shows the movie being captured turns black for about a second, then right back to the movie again. No dropped frames are reported, but in the resulting file there is about a 1 second gap in the footage. This happens about 3 to 4 times in a 60 min capture. Do I need to get an actual video card? Or maybe a second hard drive? Please help, it’s driving me mad.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Can you capture without the preview? If so, do you still get the gaps? You could also try capturing with different software such as VLC. Search for a thread under my name that provides details on how to do it for HDV.

[minidv2dvd]

capture the files with hdvsplit without preview and then import them into pinnacle to use them.

[edDV]

HDVSplit without preview takes near zero CPU resource. HDD only sees a ~4MB/sec load.

Preview requires realtime decode and can swamp weak systems. You can preview off the camcorder viewfinder for free.

[mcd74]

Thanks for the advice. I did already try HDVSplit however good ol Pinnacle wont import m2t files. appearently unsupported. I even tried changing the extension of the file to trick pinnacle, but no luck. I know pinnacle is a very buggy program but I have gotten so used to it i hate to switch to something new. plus spend more money. I downloaded the demo of sony vegas and seems over my head. I tried to turn preview off in pinnacle but the box is greyed out and cant click on it, only in dv mode can the preview be turned off. that dont make any sense either. any other ideas out there? do i need to buy a pci express vid card just to capture? Or should I have enough power now?

[minidv2dvd]

i'd guess if it doesn't support native HDV files it isn't capturing them correctly as 1440x1080 mpeg either. it may be time to move on. maybe "vegas movie studio platinum" would suit you better. and it will use HDV.

[mcd74]

Ok, good news bad news. It turns out i am havinig a problem on my old cpu as well. and I also tried hdvsplit. It stopped capturing after 1 minute 27 seconds and gave a message that the capture stopped because of dropped frames/packets. I also tried capturing with vegas and that too had problems. instead of one long nice file i ended up with six small files with 1 second gaps in between. this happened on both cpus. so now im thinking its the camera. I have changed every different setting i can find. I came accross something that is strange. When i plug in the cams fire wire, the cpu dings but nothing else. Doesnt show in the devices or in device manager anywhere. BUT, if i switch to dv, windows recognizes it immediatly. so i searched the internet for hours and saw hundreds of threads regarding windows not recognizing hv 30 in hdv mode. seems like a common problem. Whats got me confused is how does windows not recognize it but pinnacle and hdvsplit and vegas recognizes it? Then i read about possibility of the fire wire port in the cam getting damaged. Well if it was damaged, why would dv work just fine? I tried uninstalling the dv driver in the device manager, rebooted thinking it would maybe load a different hdv driver. no luck. anybody shed some light on this?

[minidv2dvd]

windows treats dv and hdv devices differently and there isn't supposed to be any device listed in my computer or anywhere else, if the hv30 is in hdv mode.

i don't even get a "ding" but hdvsplit, vegas, and all other capture software finds the hv30 fine.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Windows is seeing the cam in HDV mode and it does show in Device Manager, just not it the same place as a DV cam would(!) All capture software (DV or HDV) rely on Windows to get at the cam. FWIW, Vista (and presumably Win 7) supports HDV natively and you can use Movie Maker to capture it. Also, even a PIII laptop can capture HDV (if the right version of Windows is installed) as long as you don't try to preview it. DV and HDV use a comparitively slow-poke serial port to transfer data (the FireWire) that places virtually no demand on the system.

[edDV]

You might want to try the DV format output mode from the HDV camcorder to test your computer and IEEE-1394 connection. DV actually uses slightly more bit rate than HDV so if it works for DV mode, your issues are with HDV configuration. XP does not recognize HDV without additional software.

[mcd74]

Ok so i tried capturing dv from the canon hv30. captures fine for a while then wham, drops 70 frames all in one shot. then captures good for a while, then wham it does it again. So then I tried my old sony dv cam. Same thing although not quite as bad but it still drops a lot of frames. So im pretty sure its not the camcorders. its gotta be in the system somewhere. I tried ending all un needed programs, which didnt help. If the fire wire card was bad wouldnt it just simply not work at all? I mean it is functioning since it captures fine for a while. Then something happens, and all of a sudden it drops big chuncks. I guess i can try defrag hard drive even though its only a week old i doubt its fraged up that much.

[cd090580]

So your problem must a problem in your windows intsallation. Any resident programs ??? Crappy codec packs installed ????? Also disable antivirus and firewall while capturing.

and DEFRAGMENT your hard disk before trying to capture again. Also avoid capturing on the system drive.