VS 8 DV transcoding buffer

[fred fukumoto]

I'm having a problem capturing MiniDV from my Canon camcorder. I'm using the firewire connection and saving in MPEG format. The capture stops after about 6-7 minutes and I get a message that the DV transcoding buffer is being flushed. After the "flushing" I can again capture but it stops again after 6-7 minutes for the same reason.

I have a 180 gig external hard drive for capturing and 80 gig internal drive, running off a 2.4 mhz Pentium 4 processor with 1 meg of memory.

I've tried to see if I can increase the size of the buffer but cannot find anything that lets me do that.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[heinz-oz]

Why do you capture to mpeg? Any valid reason? I think your systems hardware cannot cope with the workload of transcoding on the fly. What other processes are running in the background? Do you have a virus scanning program running, firewall etc?

If you can, capture to DV AVI standard and convert to mpeg after you are finished with editing. If you do not want to edit and only capture DVD compliant mpeg to burn to DVD, I'm afraid, you have to have a close look at your setup and determine where the bottleneck is. Another way is to get a hardware decoder which does the conversion to mpeg in real time but software independent.

[Ken Berry]

Just to expand a little on what heinz-oz said, when you capture direct to mpeg from a digital video camera, the computer starts doing so first in DV/AVI format (which is the 'native' format on your DV tape in the camera); but then it has to convert the DV to mpeg 'on the fly'. Unless your computer is very well endowed with resources, this is a very resource-intensive process and, as heinz-oz suggests, your computer might not be able to keep up. Inevitably, some of the DV builds up in the transcode buffer while it waits for resources to be freed up for it to be transcoded to mpeg format. Eventually (every 6 - 7 minutes in your case) the buffer fills up and so the capturing process has to stop until the buffer empties out and converted to mpeg, and more space is thus created in the buffer so the process can resume. This will go on until you finish your capturing. In other words, you will inevitably end up with lots of 6 or 7 minute long captures which end where you probably don't want them to e.g. mid scene. One work-around would be to manually capture about 5 minutes of your video at a time, choosing where you want to stop, and that way your transcode buffer will not fill up.

But as heinz-oz suggests, the preferred option is to first capture in DV format, then do whatever editing you want to do, then convert it to DVD-compliant mpeg (Share > Create Video File > DVD). And once you have that, you can then burn it (Share > Create Disc).

And if you capture in DV, you can also set the capture to automatically split your captured video by scene (something you can't do when you capture to mpeg until the whole capture is complete).

[heinz-oz]

Very well put and explained Ken.

[fred fukumoto]

changed to DV format and was able to capture 1 hour of video without any problems. I then took that file and created a dvd with no difference in quality.

thank you both for your input and solution