CPU 100% in Capture Mode and DV Quick Scan Mode

[larryg]

Greetings all,

I’m trialling VS9 at the moment, after using VS6&7 for a few years, mostly unsuccessfully. The forums here have come a long way though (lots of great advice), and the tool seems much more usable now. I’ve gone through the sticky faqs, and have been able to successfully create DVDs from my Sony DCR-PC120e DV camcorder. They look pretty good.

However, I’ve noticed that capture mode uses an awful lot of CPU (even when not capturing), and using the DV Quick Scan seems to result in jumpy video capture, quite often with digital artefacts (pixilation, skipping etc). I think I’ve narrowed this down to high CPU use (duh, yeah...but read on). For some reason VS9 uses nearly all the CPU when capturing through normal means, and 100% when using the DV Quick Scan and Capture mode (certainly a lot more than VS7 which other users have highlighted)

I know what you are thinking at this point. The duffer has a rubbish PC. However, when I capture using Nero 6, very little CPU is used (about 20-25%). Also, rendering speed in VS9 is pretty good at about 1.3x real-time (i.e. 1 minute of AVI takes 1 minute 20 secs to convert to DVD format)

My systems specs are:

Dell Dimension 8200
2.4Ghz CPU
2GB RDRAM
1100 Gigabytes disk (yes, 1.1 terabytes) over 4 disks:
- 2 320 GB WD 7200rpm internal drives for working (OS on drive separate from video workspace)
- 2 250 GB WD 7200rpm external drives for archive and backup
- GEForce Ti 6800 video card
- Win XP SP2 (recently rebuilt from scratch)
- VS9 trial software installed on a clean system (no prior versions)
- Capture is via a firewire IEEE 1394 card.

I’ve noticed a few things I was wondering if someone else can confirm:

1) With VS9 open, and in edit mode (or any mode but capture). It uses very little CPU, but…
2) As soon as I switch to capture mode, and click on capture video, which turns the camera on in anticipation of capturing Video, my CPU usage climbs to around 65% (just for VS9). Note at this point I’m not actually doing anything.
3) When I start to capture, CPU increases to around 90%
4) When capturing using quick scan mode CPU usage is max 100% and video quality is poor.

I’m capturing DV straight from the camera, with no intention of transcoding, but I thought perhaps VS9 might be transcoding anyway as it captures??? Here are my project settings:

PAL (25 fps)
Microsoft AVI files
24 Bits, 720 x 576, 4:3, 25 fps
Lower Field First
DV Video Encoder -- type 1
DV Audio -- PAL, 48.000 kHz, 16 Bit, Stereo

I’m assuming it doesn’t translate though (no messages about flushing DV transcode buffer), correct?

I can’t say if I had dropped frames as the quick scan capture mode doesn’t show that information. During normal capture no frames are dropped.

Finally, as a curiousity, I noticed that if you waggle the mouse pointer in any grey background area of VS9, CPU jumps to 100% usage. (???) This behaviour doesn’t happen in other applications or in windows (desktop).

So, what’s my question? Is it normal for VS9 to use ALL the CPU on a reasonably spec’d system to capture straight DV video (no translation)?

If so, I’ll just have to put up with it. If not, any suggestions as to what may be wrong? A codec plug-in problem perhaps?

If you have read this far, thanks!

Larry.