Hi Spot.

Well, it's closed now, but I'd say about 2 1/2" vert X 3" horiz real size.

Mario

A big help for alleviating dropped frames: Make a dual boot system.

On your secondary boot partition, you can only install the essentials thus eliminating uncalled for processes that can tax your CPU and cause dropped frames. This would essentially be a capture only partition. I would be sure to NOT have anti-virus software, system utlities, defrag utilities, etc installed.

With a dual boot setup. I have never had a dropped frame ever.

I second Kentwolf's comment on virus checkers; they can kill you. If you are capturing and writing to the disk, and virus check is on for that drive, the virus checker will try to read back all the data you are writing. Your hard disk is having enough trouble just writing all the data at speed, and the virus checker forcing reads in between your writes will delay the drive long enough to cause dropped frames.

Disable virus checking only for the folder/drive you will be using, and try again. If this isn't enough, then you might have to do more drastic measures like kentwolf's dual-boot suggestion.

-Jayson

MyST,

There are other threads in the forum dealing with this. Some ideas include:

1) Capture to a separate harddrive
2) Turn off Windows indexing (so it won't index during a capture)
3) Defrag often (on the 2nd drive)
4) Turn off Virus (although my Norton is on and doesn't affect anything)
5) Turn off all the "auto check" (Automatic Windows Update, auto Quicktime, etc. Go to Start, Run, and type MSConfig and see what is starting up. I run with a selective install to kill ALL the junk (especially if you have a Dell or HP that comes with a LOT of junk that loads on start-up).

This is as drastic as I've ever gotten, and I've never dropped a single frame.

Thanks guys.

Like I mentioned, it ends up there were no dropped frames, but Vegas was reporting some during the capturing. I just don't get why it shows 129 dropped frames on the capture window, and when capturing is done, it shows 0.

I already use alot of the tips you've mentioned and will look closely at the ones I didn't know about.

Mario

Were the dropped frames adding a little at a time, or did they seem to be grouped together (when Vegas reported them)?

Dave T2

1) Capture to a separate harddrive

6) Make sure DMA is active on the hard drives
7) Disconnect (or turn off) any USB devices such as scanners or printers
8) Turn off any screen savers

Hi Dave.

To be honest, I was doing something else away from the PC when I was capturing. That being said however, when I first checked at about 13mins of capture, it was 129 dropped frames and it remained that way til the end at about 18mins in total length.
I suppose I could redo the exercise to check.

BTW, I had my PC assembled and XP installed by someone else. Windows Update is on Automatic Updates. I'm sure I was able to find where to de-activate this before, but I'll be damned if I can find it this time. Where do I shut this sucker off? My Auto-Protect is de-activated in the Norton options.

Thanks

Mario