Faulty ADVC-100?

[LanceSteel]

I've been using my ADVC-100 for a couple of months now. My captures are usually very good. A couple of times though I get what appears to be single frame encoding errors. There is a bunch of colored blocks along with a loud pop from the audio. This can happen anywhere from 0-7 times during a 1 hour capture. It makes me mad to have to rewatch the capture to make sure that it captured ok. This has happened when capturing from TV or VCR. I've used Pinnacle Studio 7 and DVIO to capture and I'm using a Compusa Firewire card.

Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem? Could flaws in the analog single make the DV encoder go haywire? Like I said, it doesn't happen all the time but it either will happened often or not at all during a capture.

Thanks for any ideas!

[mlcarson]

Your computer is unable to keep up with the DV stream. Had the same problem for a while until I optimized my BIOS settings and the problem went away. Defrag your drive and optimize the computer for speed. That solved the problem for me.

[The village idiot]

I would try the simple things first. Clean out your hard drive and then defragment it. Even it Windows says it doesn't need it, I would still defrag. Next, have you added any firewire devices? Could your firewire cable have become damaged? Are there any other appliances on the same power outlet, and/or in your house that could be causing a power dip?. I can make my DV bridge give me glitches by causing a power dip (starting anything that has a large start-up draw, like a TV, or refridgerator, etc.). I now have everything on a small UPS, simply to avoid any power problems.

[LanceSteel]

Thanks for the replies. I think it may be what mlcarson said, that the HD is having trouble keeping up with the flow of data. If I look at the live video coming out of the box without capturing you don't see any flaws but when I actually start capturing the data it gets the flaws. I haven't really optimized my HD's for video capturing. I didn't realize that turning off Windows Write Caching increased performance. (When I run the VDub sustained read/write test, the sustained write goes up from 23MB/s to 34MB/s) I haven't to test this yet but I think I'll have time tonight to try it.

Again, thanks for the replies.

[The village idiot]

23 Mb/s should be more than enough. I capture to a drive that only runs a reported 12.3 MB/s sustained. NO problems with DV. Hell my ide attached drives only show about 33 MB/s sustained. Dv is only 25 Mb/s (megabits) or about 3.x MB/s (megabytes).

[tharris]

I've got the ADVC 100 and see the brief colored blocks/pop symptom described but only when there is a stop/start point on the tape source being captured. It seems like the video/audio stream is briefly interrupted and the colored block/pop shows up in the capture.

I've never seen it while capturing from a tape, analog or DV, that hasn't been paused or stopped/started.