okay the best results that i get when capturing are :
1. Make sure it's on never preview video when capturing.
2. Don't preview audio aswell.

I'm also running on a slow computer ( but this summer getting a 3.06ghz laptop :) and these are the settings that I use and haven't had any probles with dropped frames.

Hope it helps.

It may also help to notice WHEN the frames are dropped - right at the beginning, which is easily worked around, or after a particular time, or just at random.

2 in 20 minutes sounds very little (but very annoying!) - have you tried using a different camera/DV player/cable?

To answer your question, though, NO, it's not "normal" to drop frames - I don't get them, even on an old PIII 450, and even using a 5400rpm drive on my laptop.

Thanks, rextilleon & AliasRomanian for the quick replies.

AliasRomanian: are you able to capture 20 minutes or more of video with no dropped frames?

dratme: I only have one camera - but I can try to borrow one from a friend.

I'm doing all the things you suggested (except a new 1394 cable), and more, such as:

- disable scene detection
- boost the priority of vidcap to High using task manager
- stop unneeded services and processes
- disable my network card

The one suggestion I haven't been able to implement is to put the video drive (which is IDE 7200 rpm ATA/100 UltraDMA) on a different IDE channel from the system drive. If anyone thinks this is really worth trying, I'll get a second 80-wire IDE cable.

(More info: Pentium III 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, both drives 7200 RPM ATA/100, Windows XP Pro SP1, VV 4.0 build 115, 1394 card: Dazzle DV Editor SE, camcorder: Canon ZR25 MC)

Cheers

- rick

PS - the dropped frames seem to happen at random :-(

dude dont bother changing your Ide channels. That aint the problem. I had the same problem when I was dabbling with video factory 2.0 Then I purchased Vegas and It doesn't happen at all. I could probably do a whole mini dv from my panasonic dv953 w/o dropping fames. but I go into Video Factory and blammo I get quite a few. I believe it's in the software bro. Keep dabbling. The DMA is important. I know this cause I like to write music so I'm a cubase user and this is Necessary for good latency.

Good luck man,

Press on!

hmmmm. . i think the most i ever captured at a time was about 15 mins. and no dropped frames.

Another thought - you mentioned your 1394 card but not the brand - make sure it's OHCI compliant - many people swear by the ADS Pyro, but whatever brand, Vegas needs it to be OHCI compatible.

Provided you have the HD space, you should be able to capture a whole hour's tape without dropping.

good luck

I hate to sound arrogant but I DONT DROP FRAMES...

Me too....hate to sound arrogant, but I don't drop frames either. So I don't think it is a symptom of the software (in and of itself).

That being said, I'm afraid this thread will probably turn into what you were not looking for - that is tips on how not to drop frames.

I pretty much push my processor until it screams...don't turn PC off for days (if not weeks) at a time...capture with preview screen and audio blaring...heck, I've even played video games while I was capturing and still didn't drop any frames. But then again, I'm just a rebel without a clue.

Can't suggest what is best for not dropping frames, but I'm sure there are some tips you can get to help make the process run smoother for ya.

Rick, I had this exact same problem - random dropped frames over about ten or twenty minutes of capture. The problem turned out to be my camera, a Canon zr-10. It seems the tape transport mechanism on this little bugger can get screwed up over time & cause dropped frames and eventually other nasty stuff. I see you have the zr-25. I would highly recommend trying out another camera or deck, preferably a different brand.

Good luck!
Yoyodyne

If I have blank areas at the beginning or end of my tape, I will get dropped frames. If the in/out points of my caputre are on clean tape (no blank areas) I can achieve captures up to the length of my tape with nary a dropped frame. I'm running a 900 mhz machine with 128 mb ram, use 5400 rpm firewire drives for capture - and it doesn't seem to matter whether I preview video/sound during capture or not.

You really aren't going to notice 2 dropped frames in 20 minutes of video, and, as suggested previously, if they are at the very beginning or end of your tape, chances are that you'll be trimming that material anyhow, so they won't impact your final output at all.

Good luck.

Caruso

V-4 captures at a rate of 3.43 megs per second and you should not even have
a hint of a dropped frame. This means that your problem is of the following:
1. mechanical defect
2. virus software or Norton running
3. firewire card not ohic compatible
4. IRQ conflict with video card
5. ATI video card drivers not updated
6. using ATI to capture instead of V-4
7. motherboard drivers not up to date
8. XP assigned a network driver to your firewire card.
9. more than one device connected to your firewire card (sometimes)
10 defective camera
11. camera not recognized properly
12. other software that continually access your system
13. ram chips going bad
14. motherboard going bad
15. power supply going bad
16. video card going bad
17. using the TI driver on the firewire card when not required (Use MS driver)
18. installing an old software program that overwrites a newer Microsoft driver
like the "MS DV and video camera" for the firewire card.
19. defective hard drive (run sector check)
20. OS on the same drive you are capturing to. Make sure you are capturing to a
clean drive that has no operating system.
21. In your options make sure you assign the drives you are capturing to and make
sure that drive "C" is not one of them. These options are in the capturing
part of V-4 .
22. There are more but they have slipped my mind at this time

Before you tear your hair out do this:

(1) borrow a friend's DV camcorder and try capturing with it instead.

(2) borrow your friend's firewire cable and try.

If that doesn't work, you need to make your computer pay full attention to the business of capturing. Perhaps some programs are deciding to start running in the background. Use "EndItAll" to temporarily kill every other process on the PC and see if that does the trick.

Every other post above has useful information, but as you have already surmised, there are dozens of variables.

I typically capture a complete LP tape (90minutes, 20GB) at a shot without any dropped frames (knock on wood).

JJKizak wrote:

8. XP assigned a network driver to your firewire card.

This happened on my system. What do I do to get rid of it? Can I safely just remove the device from the configuration page in XP?

Here's one for the list: analog phone cable plugged into modem, left over from pre-cable modem days. Capture was going just fine until the phone rang. Bingo, dropped frames. Windows XP thought it was more important to play the "ring" noise than it was to service an isochronous 1394 port. Geez.
///d@

You ought to be able to get a good long capture but if not consider using scene detection or limiting file sizes to some reasonable amount. This will yield a bunch of sequentially numbered files. You can then look at the dropped frames field in the capture list and mark all the files with dropped frames for batch capture. Then recapture them.

At least this way you will get all the media transferred .

BTW, defraging goes much faster with smaller media files.

To show the dropped frames field in the vidcap tool, choose a "detailed" file view (Looks just like the detailed view button in windows explorer) and then choose it again to customize that view. Add "Frames Dropped" to the list of fields viewed.

Rob Mack

PigsDad: you *should* be able to simply remove the device. I did with XP pro at home (although i wasn't dropping any frames with it enabled). For some reason though with XP Home at work, every time i remove the device, Windows adds it back in again the next time i reboot. I've tried setting it to disabled in this hardware configuration but it keeps re-enabling it every reboot as well. I'm not too worried about it as i don't drop frames there either.

I've got an 866MHz P3 at home running XP Pro now and previously 98SE. I can capture hours on end, browsing the web and playing games at the same time and not drop a single frame. However, something as simple as the little fireworks display when winning a hand of Spider Solitaire will cause about 20 to 50 frames to drop in a few seconds. Apparently some software isn't as coooperative about sharing the processor as other software is.