choppy captures

[brutherb]

I am using a PyroBasic DV firewire and a Sony TRV30 miniDV Camera. My machine specs are 2 X 80 GB 7200 rpm drives, 512 mb pc133 sdram, PIII 1.3 ghz. I am using Ulead Visual studio 5 with the dv plugin and my video and sound are choppy at different times. I have tried different capture settings and the videos are continually choppy in different spots.

[Dug]

Have you checked your DMA setting on your hard drive?
Are you using a HD with a speed of at least 5400?
Do you have a slave/spare hard drive that you can use solely for the video editing?
I am having similar troubles as you have and have found the above to help with much of the problems. Now I am looking to fix the rest of the problem.

[bachelor]

I had the same problem. It was the read/write speed of my HD. I was capturing to the same HD as my OS...not a good idea. Even though my master drive is a 40gig 7200rpm Western Digital, when I tested the read/write speed, it was around 4MB each...pathetic. When I tested the speeds of my slave, they were 17MB/sec for both read and write! What a difference! No more choppiness as I captured the DV cam vids to my slave.

To test the read/write speed of each drive, go here:

http://www.justedit.com/pub/drivers/ezdvtest.exe