When capturing footage from my Panasonic NVGS120 onto VideoStudio 8, I periodically get a message 'flushing DV transcode buffer'. This suspends the capture process and causes a few frames to be missed when the capture
process is restarted.
What is happening is that you are capturing DV and transcoding on-the-fly to MPEG2 format, and your CPU isn't fast enough to handle the conversion in realtime. Eventually UVS cannot allocate any more memory to store the incoming DV data, so it temporarily stops capturing, transcodes the buffered data, and then resumes.
My recommendation would be to not do on-the-fly transcoding to MPEG2 format, and to capture DV instead, then do your editing. When you are happy with the results, create an MPEG2 file.
There are two reasons for this. One is that DV contains more data than MPEG2, and will therefore result in better overall video quality. The other is that giving UVS extra time to handle the transcoding (i.e. not attempting to do it in realtime) allows it to do a better job.
I have taken your advice but have hit another snag..... I have selected DV as you suggest and have selected DV type 1. During playback/project preview the quality of sound and picture gets progressively worse (i.e. dropped frames) after approx 1 minute. Settings are the ones supplied when DV is selected as the source. My PC is reasonably powerful (2.53 MhZ, 512 meg of ram). and am running v8.0 of UVS.
Try to ignore the problems in the Preview mode, they are not necessarily indicative of problems later when you create a DVD or video file.
Open up the captured DV AVI file using Windows Media Player, and see if the video is clear and the sound crisp. With DV capture, there is no encoding going on, UVS merely has to write the data from the FireWire bus to disk.
If the Windows Media Player playback looks OK, then try creating an MPEG2 file inside UVS, using the settings that are appropriate for your location -- there is a selection for PAL DVD for the encoding type when you select MPEG output. You may want to do this with just a short section of the captured AVI file by selecting it with the Mark In / Mark Out controls.
The MPEG2 file should also play back without problem, though it may not be quite as clear as the AVI file -- the highest bitrate for DVD-compatible MPEG files is only about 1/3 to 1/2 of the native DV bitrate.
Oh, one more thing: if you are using V8.0, upgrade to V8.01 by downloading the patch from Ulead's website. It fixes a nasty memory leak that may be the reason behind the performance slowdown you are seeing.
When capturing footage from my Panasonic NVGS120 onto VideoStudio 8, I periodically get a message 'flushing DV transcode buffer'. This suspends the capture process and causes a few frames to be missed when the capture