Drop frames when capturing video

mvidoni · Post by **mvidoni** » Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:38 pm

Hi people
First I will post my computer specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2600+
256 MB Ram
60 GB HD
Firewire pci card
Video Studio 6 With latest updates

I´m using a Sony Digital Handycam DCR-TVR310 NTSC Cam

When I start capturin in DV mode, after a few minutes I start getting drop frames.
What can I do to solve this problem??
Thanks everybody

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Feb 01, 2006 2:01 pm

You need more memory. 512MB is OK but marginal. 1GB is quite adequate.

Your hard drive is also too small to do serious video editing. It may not have enough free space. DV files are very bulky and need about 13GB per hour of video.

GuyL · Post by **GuyL** » Wed Feb 01, 2006 6:26 pm

Higher system specs would help for sure.

Try a fresh defrag on your hard disk before the capture and close down all other applications including virus, spyware, etc.

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 9:44 pm

jchunter wrote:You need more memory. 512MB is OK but marginal. 1GB is quite adequate.

Your hard drive is also too small to do serious video editing. It may not have enough free space. DV files are very bulky and need about 13GB per hour of video.

Not true in my experience! I've tested my own (albeit Intel) system extensively with various configurations of RAM from 256 up to 1536Mb, with NO EFFECT on capturing.

The only significant benefit is when smart rendering, apart from general usage and multi-tasking, of course.

The only time I've had dropped frames was when the screen saver tried to kick in - as Guy said, make sure all the obvious things are turned off when capturing or video editing.

Sounds more like a hard drive issue to me - try enabling write caching on the capture drive if it's disabled, or disabling it if it's not! Make sure DMA is enabled on the drive.

mvidoni · Post by **mvidoni** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 9:28 pm

I´ve tryed all what you told me, but I still have dropped frames.
I saw a post that says to try with WinDV.
I tryed it, and no dropping frames in 25 minutes of capturing,
but it doesn´t capture audio. Dunno if this is a problem or WinDV does not capture audio.
Anyways, I will keep trying diferent things.
If someone has an idea, please tell me.
Thanks

bkasman · Post by **bkasman** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 9:56 pm

I have a relatively low end system (256MB and 2.0GHz with 120GB of HD) on which VS9 drops about 10% of the frames (about 9K for 60 minute video), resulting in a very choppy audio. I have had versions since VS6 installed (and removed) on this system, and never had this problem (maybe 10-12 dropped frames in total).

Is it time to look for another package? Or upgrade the system? Based on what I have read so far, second option may not actually help.

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 12:25 am

Hi mvidoni,

you might try the following:

open task manager, and click on the processes tab - then capture the task manager window, and post it to the forum. Might be some odd service or process running.

You can also check to see if your hard drive is the culprit by running something such as SiSoft Sandra Lite, a freeware benchmarking utility, to check the sustained data transfer rate of your hard drive. It's about an (Mb download if I remember right. Normally the recommendation is for a minimum of an ATA100 7200 rpm IDE drive, and such a drive might show as low as 25Mb/sec and up to 50Mb/sec or so in the SiSoft tests.

You should be able to capture audio as well as video with WinDV, so something is amiss.