Capture Drop Frames

pconti wrote on 4/9/2003, 9:21 PM
Has anyone had a problem with Capture in VV4. I've noticed that when I reach the 10 and a half minute mark it drops about 40 to 45 frames pretty quickly. Then, it usually stops dropping frames again until the 20 minute mark. I never encountered this in VV3.

For the record I'm using a Dell P4 at 2 ghz. The Capture Drive is only for media and it's a wide SCSI at 10,000 RPM. I'm capturing through a TI 1394.

If I stop capturing when it starts to drop frames and then resume it's fine. I haven't tried turning off audio preview yet because I never had dropped frames before.

Comments

riredale wrote on 4/9/2003, 10:55 PM
Could your PC be scheduled to start another task at the 10-minute mark?--a virus scan, a defrag, or checking for mail? I don't use the VidCap program in Vegas, but something soaking up a lot of clock cycles is clearly happening at that point in time.
Lear wrote on 4/10/2003, 2:58 AM
May be that's right.
PDB wrote on 4/10/2003, 4:26 AM
Is the capture drive de-fragged?
pconti wrote on 4/10/2003, 10:43 AM
I'm going to try a couple of things tonight. I'll try each one individually to see what works. First I'll disable NAV real time protection during capture. If that doesn't work I'll try doing it without audio preview. Then I'll also defrag the drive. I suppose the last could be an issue since this is my primary capture drive.

One thing I noticed last night is that when I captured DVC PRO tape via an ADVC-100 I dropped 44 or 45 frames at the 10:30 mark. When I captured my DV AVI material from the camera at the same time mark it drops 10 to 12 frames.

I'm wondering if it's flushing a buffer at that point and writing it to disk.

Incidentally I failed to mention that the OS is XP Pro and the machine has 2 gig of ram.
PDB wrote on 4/10/2003, 12:33 PM
If you haven't de-fragged your drive in a while (and been capturing...) it will most probably be an important factor (especially if you are capturing large chunks at a time). I have a 120 gig firewire drive which had 75% free space and was dropping loads of frames at fairly regular intervals: de-fragging completely solved the problem. Some Pros recommend de-fragging before every capture session...

Anyway, Hope you sort it out!

Good Luck!
Paul.
pconti wrote on 4/10/2003, 9:47 PM
I'm going to defrag tonight after I finish rendering the first act of this play. NAC and audio preview didn't have anything to do with it so I'll try defragging the drive and let you know.

Thanks for the suggestions.
pconti wrote on 4/21/2003, 12:25 PM
It was the defrag issue. I defragged the drive and it captured 2 hours worth without dropping a single frame. Thanks for the tip!