Capturing to other than C: - Part Deux

GerryLeacock wrote on 11/13/2003, 10:16 AM

OK, I've officially given up on trying to capture video to an external drive. Dropped frames galore. Now I try to capture to my INTERNAL D: drive, and I get the same result - easily 50% of the frames dropped.

Suggestions??? (with thanks)

Gerry

Comments

laz wrote on 11/15/2003, 3:46 AM

I use EndItAll to turn off most b/ground progs (w2k), especially av and firewall (main reason for dropped frames). Plus VF sometimes tells fibs on amount. Also, try increasing paging to 2 - 3 times total ram, with min and max same. ie my ram is 391 so my paging is 1000 min and max.

BTW it depends on how good caddie is to capture to ext hd. Also ex hd's get quite hot due to lack of cooling which affects data-flow.

Stiffler wrote on 11/15/2003, 7:25 PM

How does your captured file play? Does it look like it has dropped frames?

JohnnyRoy wrote on 11/16/2003, 11:08 AM

Gerry,

Some things to check:

1. Are you sure your hard drives are using DMA? Sometimes they can be switched from DMA when new drivers are installed. It always pays to check,

2. I would allocate a permanent Windows swap file that is 2 times the size of your physical memory. This will keep Windows from allocating swap space right in the middle of a capture. To keep it from being fragmented, I select no swap file. Reboot, Defragment. Then select permanent swap file to make sure its allocated within the largest contiguous free space. Reboot.

3. Make sure the drive you’re capturing to has been defragmented. You’ll drop frames if Windows spends too much time looking for a blank sector to store your capture file.

4. Is the drive you’re trying to capture to a Master or Slave IDE device? If it’s a slave and the master is a slower device (i.e., CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD-RW, etc.) it will be limited by the speed of the master device.

5. As others have stated, use EndItAll2 to kill all background processes.

This is all I can think of at the moment. ;-)

(just for comparison sake)
I have 512MB memory with a 1GB fixed swap file. I also have two physical hard drives. One partitioned (C:) for system and (D:) for applications as primary IDE master, and one for capture (E:) as primary IDE slave and I never have dropped frames. (I capture DV via Firewire) My secondary IDE master is my Pioneer A03 DVD-RW and secondary IDE slave is a ZIP drive.

Hope this helps.

~jr