"Fight Club" effect while capturing with VirtualDu

[Scav]

Helpful folks,

I've been capturing from VHS tape for many months now with great success using the following process: vcr -win/tv card - Virtualdub - huffy codec. However, lately on what may be the oldest source material, I've noticed this problem that occurs that makes the resulting capture almost unwatchable. The effect is a brief (perhaps only one frame's worth) display of an image from the tape from a second or two previously. It's like a brief flashback is displayed for a split-second of a scene that was being displayed a second or two previously on the screen. It is becoming increasingly annoying, and the only bright spot is that each time I see it, I can't help but be reminded of the film-splicing scene from Fight Club, and I end up grinning like a fool. The effect is just like that.
It doesn't seem to be dependednt on content, it happens in slow scenes as well as fast ones, dark as well as light. The only variable is that it seems to become more frequent as the tape plays longer. The thing is, it does NOT appear when I am simply previewing in the capture window, it does NOT appear when viewing the tape through the WinTV viewing application, and it does Not appear when watching the tape on another VCR hooked to a TV. Only during VDub capture mode does this occur, and of course the effect ends up in the captured file as well.

Has anyone run across this before, and found a resolution?

Any replies would be appreciated,

Thanks

[Scav]

Come on now, no one's run across this before?

[LanceSteel]

I've never heard of that before. I would have said that it sounds like your vcr is failing or the TV cap card is bad but since you don't see this when just watching it on your computer I would say its software based. This shouldn't have any effect but have you tried changing the codec or capture resolution to see if that fixes things?

[Scav]

Hey, thanks for the feedback.
I'd be willing to try anything, but after fooling with various parameters in the Capture and Video menus, I now cannot capture at all. I keep getting the error:

Unable to initialize capture file

, followed by a nasty debug dialog box. But VDub doesn't actually crash at this point.
I could swear I'd run into this problem before, and it was a fairly easy fix, but I can't remember what it was. Anyone?

[LanceSteel]

It sounds like some drivers (or Windows itself) got corrupted. Try unistalling and reinstalling vdub and see if that helps. If that doesn't fix things you may want to unistall/reinstall your capture card drivers and see if that fixes things. I've had a problem like this on an old pci cap card that I used to have and I fixed it by uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers.

I'd be willing to try anything, but after fooling with various parameters in the Capture and Video menus, I now cannot capture at all.

Are you sure your setting the capture device back to the main capture device in vdub's Capture settings and not the default cap device?

[tonyp12]

Maybe is has to do with that HD can not keep up.

Do a defrag on it.

And it is always good to do a reboot before capping.

(same goes with CD/DVD burning)

[leebo]

Do the flash frames make you want to kill anybody?

[Scav]

Only Chairman Bill ....

[Thorn]

At least they were frames from a the same film and not of a particular organ

I would agree it's a driver problem (unless the card is dying... my 1394 card acted really funny before stopping altogether. A new card fixed the problem). My Gainward Geforce4 card had a lot of dropped frames (and the computer refused to shut down) so I uninstalled the drivers, installed the reference drivers, uninstalled the reference drivers, and reinstalled the gainward drivers. Worked like a champ (just reinstalling the drivers isn't enough, you have to uninstall first). Even if it isn't a driver problem that's one of the first things you should try.

The 'unable to initialize' error for me is caused by something locking up some resources. Rebooting fixes that (but this sounds like a less transient resource problem -- back to the drivers).