Choppy audio on DV capture

[Boomdawg]

I keep getting extremely choppy audio when I capture from my Sony DCR-TRV30 through my Firewire PCI card. I've tried several different capture programs, VideoWave5, Ulead VideoStudio6, DVD Complete.
Occasionally I get good audio, but most of the time it's horrible.
Any advice appreciated.

Setup:
Win XP Pro
1.5G P4
1Gb RAMBUS
Firewire PCI card
Sony DCR-TRV30

[crajshree]

do u get good video quality, when capturing to avi format? mine is sony dcr trv11 but bad quality in avi format

[kcemd]

Try to uninstall your sound card driver and reboot to reinstall it. It worked for me and I had the same problem.

[theNOBuk]

I've just gone and got a firewire card having recently purchased a JVC camcorder.

My first attempt at capture was not too good. Both video and sound quality were jerky and seemed out of sync. I'm using XP with Moviexone.

Ultimately I would like to be able to burn SVDCs with VHS or better quality. Anyone help?

[beach]

are you using via onboard sound, had the same problem, cured it by updating the sound drivers http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=69

[z1]

Well your system is much better than my p3 450 but i had same problem with jerky dv captures. Some where in this forum i read you should enable dma on your harddrive. I did and now i can capture perfect dv. Encoding it to and artifact free svcd is a different matter all together though :cry:

[Boomdawg]

I get excellent video quality and about every 9 times out of 10 the audio is all choppy.

I'm using IEEE 1394 for importing. Does the soundcard have effect on this? I would think it would only effect it if you were using the soundcard for audio input and not Firewire for input.

[EricB]

Maybe a silly question but have you tried compressing a sample to mpg1 or mpg2 ? Is the audio still choppy?

I find playing back DV AVI is demanding enough on the system that sometimes the frames aren't completely smooth. The file is fine when passed back out FireWire to the camera, but just trying to play on the computer is too much.

[alk]

Are you sure you are not loosing frames while capture??

I use XP Pro
Pentium III 650 128 mb ram
Soundblaster awe 64.

Ultra ata IDE HD 20 gb.
Fire IEEE 1394 Sony TRV-110
Ulead Video Studio 6 -
Its a common simple hard and all works fine

(check and active DMA,
dont try to hear the sound while capture, its not necesary.
capture in DV- AVI)

[dgsmith]

I use my sony to pass thru like you explained. I know that it takes approx 3.8 MB/sec sustained transfer rate to get it on your hdd. I run "perfmon" from the start/run tab and add processor utiliaztion %, physical disk MB/write/ sec and memory useage. You get a good idea if your cpu is pegged (probably not in your case) or if your HDD subsystem is not able to keep up. You can download sclive demo and there is a mute option to where you get no sound on pc.

sound card has nothing do do with it except to play the sound from the "preview stream" you are watching unless you specify it as the audio-in device in you capture app. They shoud default to dv input for sound.

Is your hdd full / defragged properly?

[theNOBuk]

Yes, I think I am losing frames. The capture program (MovieXone) reports this as its running.

My IDE controller is set to 'DMA if available'. I haven't tried defragging the disk but my system is quite new so I wouldn't expect it to be a problem. I've got about 13Gb free and I'm only trying to capture very small chunks of video (40 seconds!).

I've tried converting to MPeg2 and burned to VCD and the choppiness appears at each stage, which I suppose I expect if the frames are being lost.

What causes the lost frames?

[ktnwin]

Capturing DV via Firewire should not cause any problem to the captured video and audio. This is simply a streaming tape to disk copy operation.

If there is any problem, check out the capture software, it may have bugs !!!

I ran into this ONCE and that really piss me off (this was on an borrowed iMAC to get first experience with DV), after capturing, I made some minor editing then output it back out to DV tape. During this, the audio had static noises injected and my final tape got the audio with those noises on it. It turned out even the edited AVI file also got that same audio problem.

Don't know what happened there. After I got my own DV setup on a PC, I never had this problem again.