Capturing issue with Canopus ADVC-110

[nharikrishna]

Hi all,

I have a problem and a question on capturing with Canopus ADVC-110.

1. While capturing from a Satellite source (S-Video) using WinDV, the software freezes intermittently, stopping the capturing process. Sometimes even the software reports (I used Premiere CS4 for capturing sometimes) that the capture device has gone offline in the middle of the capture process. I don't know if this is a ADVC hardware issue, because the same thing happens on a different computer as well. May be Satellite box causes this? I connected ADVC-110 through a clean power.

2. How does Canopus (and WinDV) know what is the aspect ratio (4:3, 16:9) of the incoming analog signal (S-Video) while capturing from Satellite box (or any other analog source for that matter)?

Thanks for the help.

[DB83]

To answer your question:

AFAIK WinDV will capture 720*576(PAL) as 4:3. I just fed a 16:9 signal to it and it captured an anamorphic 16:9 image in a 4:3 frame and mediainfo reports the file as 4:3. So it then remains a relatively sinple matter to change the DAR flag to correct the display to 16:9 widescreen.

As to your problem, WinDV is quite old. I do not think it was ever upgraded to support Win7.

[cd090580]

WinDv works fine on W7 from a mini dv camcorder

[LightWeightProducer]

It may be completely irrelevant but my aging ADVC100 used to have this precise same problem under any version of Windows with any DV software you can name and the only solution was to power cycle the ADVC. A couple of computer upgrades back it suddenly started working without issue. There appears to be a few factors at work.

The firewire controller in the PC has changed and the power supply for the ADVC has changed. For a long time I ran my ADVC from the 5 volt mains adaptor but for convenience I have it connected to the PC +5 supply. Under this configuration with earlier motherboard / PCI firewire card (TI based) the random ADVC hang would still happen. Then after a motherboard upgrade the problem stopped.

A few weeks ago I happened to be running the ADVC off the mains adaptor that it came with and it misbehaved for the first time in a long time. I switched it back to the PC's +5 and ever since its been stable as rock.

What's causing all this to happen? It might be a mix of incompatibility between the PC firewire controller and the ADVC and it might also be due to differential voltage problems between the PC and the Canopus supplied mains adaptor floating.

WinDV runs fine for me under Win 7 64 bit.

[edDV]

Hi all,

I have a problem and a question on capturing with Canopus ADVC-110.

1. While capturing from a Satellite source (S-Video) using WinDV, the software freezes intermittently, stopping the capturing process. Sometimes even the software reports (I used Premiere CS4 for capturing sometimes) that the capture device has gone offline in the middle of the capture process. I don't know if this is a ADVC hardware issue, because the same thing happens on a different computer as well. May be Satellite box causes this? I connected ADVC-110 through a clean power.

I've never seen this issue capturing from a Motorola cable box. I've observed several issues capturing over IEEE-1394.

First is the disk should not have other seeks going on while capping. Ideally you capture to a second ATA/SATA drive rather than the OS drive. A USB drive is subject to interrupt since the USB disk controller is a software process. ATA/SATA drives use isolated hardware disk controllers.

WinDV sets up a memory buffer and will take a short term disk busy hit. If the buffer fills you will see frame loss in the counter. WinDV also stops preview when the CPU is close to 100% utilized. If the disk is still available, recording continues. Simple DV stream transfer to a file via buffer memory is mostly a hardware process once the bus master and memory are set up before recording starts. Stream monitoring is a software process.

A similar program DVIO allows manual preview selection. With preview set to off, almost no CPU is used during stream capture.

I have the ADVC-100 with separate power supply. Power rating for the supply is 5v @2.5A which is a lot of amperage. The ADVC-110 can take power off the IEEE-1394 bus but taking 2.5A may be an issue. Best to use a dedicated power supply.

2. How does Canopus (and WinDV) know what is the aspect ratio (4:3, 16:9) of the incoming analog signal (S-Video) while capturing from Satellite box (or any other analog source for that matter)?

The ADVC-100/110 does not read the wide (vertical interval) flag from analog sources. It will record anamorphic 16x9 wide video ok (horizontally squeezed). You need to set the wide bit separately, or as I do, change clip properties pixel aspect ratio to wide in the edit program.

[nharikrishna]

Thanks to all for the replies.

[turk690]

First is the disk should not have other seeks going on while capping. Ideally you capture to a second ATA/SATA drive rather than the OS drive. A USB drive is subject to interrupt since the USB disk controller is a software process. ATA/SATA drives use isolated hardware disk controllers.

When capturing DV/HDV through FireWire, a second independent ATA/SATA internal HDD (NOT external USB drive) is NOT an option, but IS mandatory. This has to BE emphasized. This puts most laptops and notebooks with their single HDD, which some would-be video experimenters have decided to stick with, immediately out of the serious league. I will certainly expect capture freezing and frame drops galore in that notebook PC scenario.