Lagging audio

[Redester]

I have just captured a file using VHS movie tape into the composite video input of a Pinnaclesys' Studio 9 capture card.


AVI video, 352X240, 44.1 k audio.
10 minute file = 1.54 Gigabyte in size!
That would mean the total movie length of 210 minutes would be in excess of 32 Gigabytes! Can that be for real???

Also, and of greater concern is the audio progressively lags the video. meaning it gets worse the farther it goes! The book shows a selection in the Advance panel of the Capture program that allows a click on "Syncrhonize Audio to Video", or similar. BUT... NOT on my machine. The lower portion of the Advance panel does not show. This audio lag was the problem we fought for months with Pinnacle Studio 9 program. Hence, my reason for moving to Ulead.

I have done a complete unload/reload of MSP8 three times. No difference.

Has anyone here had experience with this capture card and could the properties of that card be causing the abscence of the selection in the Capture/Advance panel?

If this is indeed my problem, I am open for suggestions of a Capture card having Composite and S-video inputs as this is my sources of input for VHS and DVD.

Thanks,

Ray

[Terry Stetler]

Could be you're dropping frames. As you progressively drop more frames the audio and video get further out of whack.

What compression are you using? Is the video being captured to a dedicated hard drive on a separate cable from the boot drive? If not that'll do it.

Also: I see you're using a SoundBlaster Live.

Hmmmm......seen trouble with SBL's in the past due to PCI bus hogging. They're a high latency device, and sometimes they'll saturate the bus and cause capture cards to drop frames. Been there, done that and now 4 SBL's sit on my shelf collecting dust.

This is a quote from ALive!, a Creative support site, that you might find interesting as they did an expose' of the SBL's deficiencies;

Creative may have designed the Sound Blaster Live! and its drivers to utilize the PCI bus inefficiently, or pushed it close to the PCI specs' limits that makes it sensitive to differing PCI bus & timings. Here's a quote from Pinnacle Systems, a company specializing in video capture solutions which have problems with Sound Blaster cards (taken from page 3 of the test report):

"According to Pinnacles observations, Liveware seems to permanently transfer null-bytes over the PCI bus to the SB Live, even at times when it does not have to play notes. In the worst case, this destroys up to 30 % of a system's PCI bandwidth (that's why we noticed it on video-capturing ...). Deactivating SB Live's MIDI functions stops this behavior."

PCI timing, which seems to be somewhat critical anyway, is extremely burdened in such a case, thus making the error rate explode. And what's got Creative Support to say? Right: nothing!

Sounds like bad driver programming, or inefficiencies in the EMU10K1 design, requiring it to be fed useless null-bytes to keep it operating. Either way, the SBLive! is a PCI bus hog.

'nuff said.

If I were you I'd do as the article suggests and disable its MIDI functions and see what happens. If that doesn't help I'd consider another card, perhaps an M-Audio Revolution (owned by AVID), Turtle Beach Catalina or Turtle Beach DLL.

[Devil]

Yes, it can be for real. Many compression systems require huge amounts of space. Even DV would require ~45 Gb for 210 min of video, so your's, even with the low resolution, is quite modest. Some codecs, with appropriate settings, would even take up >300 Mb for 210 min.

Another frequent cause of dropped frames is your HDD not being able to keep up with the data rate. This could be because of a number of factors, fragmentation being a frequent cause. Use a utility like Sandra to check on the data rate. For your files, including a safety margin, it would need to be able to keep a sustained data transfer rate on write AND read of at least 20 Mb/s.

Another common cause for dropped frames is that you simply do not have the resources available to run video software. This often happens if you have an Internet connection, even if disabled, with firewall, anti-virus or anti-malware. If you do not have a dedicated video computer, then, at least, have your video software running under a dedicated second boot, without access to the Internet and without any security utilities. Minimise all the boot-up drivers etc. to bare bones.

FYI, I've used SB Live! with MJPEG and DV Type 1 and Type 2 codecs at higher data rates than yours, but this is also mother-board dependent. I have done so with Baby Bravo, Shuttle and MSI mother-boards but failed miserably with three different Asus boards (many years ago), all with Intel chipsets. In fact, one of the Asus ones had an identical chipset to the Baby Bravo and I swapped the processor, memory and other components, so work that one out! The only reason I don't use Live! for my main video computer now is that I've swapped it for a 5.1 card, but I've put the Live! into a secondary computer occasionally used for video and other work.

[Redester]

1. Compression is MS YUY2

2. Yes... saving to the boot drive. Uh Oh!! (It made no difference when using Studio 9, c:/ or d:/ BTW) The lag remained the same. I even bought and installed a SCSI drive in hopes of better performance.. Wrong! more wasted $$

3. I have never had Dropped Frames from either Pinnacle Studio 9 or MSP8. (Show set to "ON.")

4. I don't recall the data transfer rates that Studio 9 showed. But, they were well above the minimums. I assume the same in MSP8.....

5. I bought the SB Audigy 2 board thinking this might solve the lagging audio. Nope, and worse.. I could find no driver for Linux and Creative seemed to care less! Buddies of "Bill"?? So, I owe no allegence there.

For now it seems I will have to create lots of room on my 2nd IDE drive, scrape up some MORE $$$ and try to find a sound card which will fit my purpose. I am still open for suggestions. as I have found nothing... yet.

Thanks again and stay tuned for the next chapter of my "Going Crazy with MSP8",

Ray

[Devil]

In the first place, capturing analogue is always hairy; you have to have everything just so.

If you want to do it the easy way with the audio locked to the video, then my advice would be to buy a Canopus ADVC unit, which does a hardware conversion to DV, which you can then import via IEEE-1394 to DV Type 1 using MSP Capture. Hassle-free and the quality is much better than that of the original VHS tape, so you lose nothing. It will also be better than your low resolution YUY2. And you won't need a new sound card.

[Redester]

Thanks Devil,

I'll check on the Canopus unit. Does this machine have a Firewire output? I currently am using a dual VCR/DVD player with no 1394 capability.

TTYL,

Ray

[Devil]

There are several models. The ADVC-51 is analogue-in, IEEE-1394 out. The ADVC-110 is analogue-in/out, IEEE-1394 in/out (very versatile). The ADVC-300 is as the 110 plus time-base correction and noise filtering (quite expensive, but better for iffy tapes). I use the ADVC-100, which was the predecessor of the 110.

[Redester]

Yes... expensive. I have to think about whether it's worth the effort/time just to convert some VHS movies. Most are probably already on DVD and available for checkout from the local library. It seems that every program I have seen all have the same problem with lagging audio when entering analog tape. I hate the fact that I couldn't know that MSP8 had the problem before the purchase. Pinnacle was more simple to use. I may just settle on trying to make "Movies" from ends and pieces of the mini-DVDs I accumulated last Summer from a convention. That is the most important venture.

That's life. I hope I have enough left to survive this effort!

Thanks again,

Ray

[sjj1805]

Redester

If your still stuck.....
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Steve J