Canopus ADVC110 w/Power Director audio stutter problems when capturing?

[popflier]

I had been using my Canopus ADVC 110 to capture a bunch of VHS tapes I had via Cyberlink Power Director 5. Everything was working fine for several months. Then I had a computer crash and had to reinstall windows and everything else. Afterwards I had an issue getting my ADVC 110 hardware to be recognized by Power Director. I checked all of the connections and connected and reconnected my 110, but nothing.

Today, after a few months, I unplugged my firewire and plugged it back in and was prompted with the option to capture using Power Director. I clicked okay and tried to capture another tape. The video captured just fine, but the audio is stuttering during record and playback. I'm running a quad core w/10,000 rpm Raptor drive, 4GB RAM, nvidia quadro fx 4500 w/512mb, Tascam US-428 usb soundcard, winxp pro.

Anyone know why this is now happening? I've checked everything that I can think of to check: no drivers for the advc 110, 1394 device manager properties say device is working and enabled, changed capturing to a different hard drive, but nothing.

Help please?

[edDV]

Try it with WinDV instead of Power Director. Is power director encoding? Should be set to DV.

Capture to a disk other than the OS drive.

DV capture is only 3.5MB/s (~28Mb/s).

[popflier]

Yeah, Power Director is encoding, set to DV, and saving the files. Upon playback the video is fine, but the audio still stutters. I tried capturing to 3 different drives. 2 that are 7200 SATA 500GB drives and are almost entirely empty and then my Raptor that has my OS on it. Makes no difference what drive. I still have the stuttering. All drives are internal. I just don't understand why it worked fine before and now it won't. I'll look into WinDV. Thanks for that tip.

[edDV]

Encoding while capturing has various dangers but your hardware should be adequate for MPeg2. Get it working as a pure DV stream transfer to a file first then experiment.

WinDV will do a straight DV to DV-AVI file transfer. No way to screw it up with encodeing.

[popflier]

It's just killing me that I can't get it working the way it was. I have about 450 VHS tapes to transfer (literally!) and put to DVD. Capturing to AVI and then encoding to MPEG2 is going to take me FOREVER. Maybe I'll try upgrading my Power Director to version 8 and see if that doesn't fix the issue. If not then I'll need to look into WinDV and go the route you suggested. Thanks.

[lordsmurf]

Yeah, it will take a few years for 450 tapes -- unless you want to rush and do a crap job.

[edDV]

It's just killing me that I can't get it working the way it was. I have about 450 VHS tapes to transfer (literally!) and put to DVD. Capturing to AVI and then encoding to MPEG2 is going to take me FOREVER. Maybe I'll try upgrading my Power Director to version 8 and see if that doesn't fix the issue. If not then I'll need to look into WinDV and go the route you suggested. Thanks.

It wasn't clear this is what you were doing.

A better program for realtime MPeg2 software encoding is ULead Video Studio version 8 (full version not OEM) or later. It contains the real time module for the licensed Mainconcept MPeg2 codec*. Most other programs lack this realtime module even Premiere Pro and Vegas Pro.

It should encode MPeg2 off a DV stream with a Core2Duo or better CPU but you need to test it with your system to see the limits of compression before it exceeds it's buffer and drops frames**. The more you compress, the more the CPU needs to work. My Core2Duo can compress down to 4Mb/s before it risks dropping frames. The P4 2.8 MHz dropped frames below 6Mb/s.

I used this mainly for TV captures from the Canopus ADVC. Now I use hardware MPeg2 encoders (Hauppauge PVR250/350) which work in the background without taxing the CPU. For high quality capture, I use the Canopus ADVC to a DV-AVI file.


*Mainconcept realtime MPeg codecs are used for most pro level realtime software transcoders like Telestream and Anystream.

** It is extremely important that you place the Video Studio tmp directory on a disk other than the OS drive and that you don't heavily access that drive from any other process. The PCI bus must be in bus master mode. Check this from time to time because system crashes sometimes default's the temp directory back to the C: drive. Vegas does this too.

[popflier]

Thanks edDV. That's really helpful info.

I have 2 completely isolated drives whose only purpose is to capture these VHS tapes. This is currently the only job this specific computer has. I'll take a look at everything you suggested and post a follow up later. Thanks again.

@lordsmurf: The project actually started 3 years ago with over 1500 tapes and now I'm down to about 450. I know it will take me about another year and a half to complete, but it's absolutely worth it.