MSP8 HD Capture - what am I doing wrong?

ten18 · Post by **ten18** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 12:45 am

I'm about ready to give up on Ulead . . . I have a Sony FX-1 and am trying to capture HDV with MSP8. The capture app recognizes the camera, and it captures, but after a few seconds, the preview window freezes up. When I try to view the captured video in the editor's preview window, it's very choppy, as if it's dropped every other frame. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to tell if frames are dropping during the capture process (as you can in Premiere). I don't think it's a hardware problem, as I have an HP XW6000 with two 3.06Ghz Xeon CPU's, 2GB RAM, and U320 SCSI hard drives. The capture card is an old Pinnacle DV500 DVD. I can't imagine that it would be the problem, since it's just a glorified Firewire port now.

Is the preview freeze normal? Shouldn't the captured HDV play back normally in the editor, or is the bandwidth too high for accurate playback on the PC?

I also have MSP7 with the HD plugin, which was a complete waste of money. I was able to capture and edit about 10 hours of HDV in VS9 (with the free HD plugin), but I'd like to start using MSP, so I can output in 480P.

Thanks for any advice.

Keith
ten18

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 7:17 am

Let it be quite clear that I have never tried to capture HDV in any shape or form but I would like to mention a few generalities.

There are two ways of capturing in MSP8; using the integrated capture module in Video Editor and using the autonomous Video Capture module. I would recommend you use only the latter and close down every other app that is swallowing resources, in order to obtain the best performance needed for HDV.

In VC, there is an indication of dropped frames on bottom-left of the window,

When VC is doing something that requires high resources, the preview window does not show every frame but just one in up to 20 or 30, so that it does not have to spend resources needlessly on the display. The preview display is not essential to capture but is just a convenience. Even transcoding a DV does this, although straight DV datastream transfer aka "capture" displays every frame. Nevertheless, although the preview is choppy, the file is normal and contains every frame.

Note that some so-called DV ports on specialised cards (I don't know about the Pinnacle one) may not be fully IEEE-1394 compliant. I would prefer using a dedicated IEEE-1394 card with a chipset of reliable origin.

ten18 · Post by **ten18** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 7:59 pm

Devil - thanks for the reply. The preview indeed seems to show every 20th (or 50th) frame (it's hard to tell), so apparently that's the way it's supposed to work.

I'm really thinking about changing my capture card - the DV500 supposedly has 1394-compliant driver (it works fine with DV), but it's pretty old, so I'd like to get something more current. Do you think a standard Firewire card will be adequate for HDV, or do I need an accelerator card (Matrox, ADS, etc.). What cards are compatible with MSP8?

Thanks

Keith
ten18

johnpr98 · Post by **johnpr98** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 8:30 pm

Code: Select all

Do you think a standard Firewire card will be adequate for HDV

I use an ADS 1394 card with no problems

Yep, preview can be sparodic, the graphic card is the bottleneck IMO
I only have a cheap Nvidia 5200 FX, if my mb supported it I would get a PCI Express (I upgraded to early)

Regards

ten18 · Post by **ten18** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 5:55 am

Thanks very much for the replies - I went ahead and replaced the DV500 card with an ADS Pyro 1394 card. Video capture seems to be working now, although I haven't tried to do anything with the file. The DV500 must have been trying to process the HDV output from the camera (?), which it obviously isn't capable of doing.

On to the next step. . .