Dropped 2,913,084 Frames on 3 minute Capture!

adamt wrote on 10/30/2002, 7:58 PM

I'm having a little problem with dropped frames. The report from my capture session indicates 2,913,084 dropped frames on a session length of 03:03:54.21 and an average frame rate of 29.97 fps. Now my math isn't up to much, but I'm having trouble figuring how I managed to drop nearly 3 million frames in 3 minutes at 30 frames per second ;-D

I'm using a Canon Optura MiniDV camcorder with a firewire connection to a Dell Dimension 8100 P4 1.4GHz with 256MB of PC2700 DDR SDRAM. I just purchased a new 60GB Maxtor DiamondMax 7200rpm ATA133 hard drive with 2MB cache which is device 2 on the primary IDE chain and is dedicated to AV use only. The drive is newly formatted and the controller is using ULTRA DMA Mode 5. I'm running Windows XP Pro SP1.

I have tried the following:

Used Task Manager to set the vidcap25.exe priority to 'high'.
In VideoCapture I have turned off the 'Enable DV scene Detection' option and set the capture start delay to 2 seconds.
I have turned off both audio and video preview.

There are no other processes running with the exception of the usual Windows background processes, the screen saver is turned off and I even turned off Windows Indexing on the drive.

None of these changes made the slightest difference to the dropped frame total.

The captured video clip looks and sounds perfect so I'm left wondering if VideoCapture is misreporting the frames dropped but I don't want waste my time editing the clips if the overall quality is in doubt.

Any help would be appreciated and reduce further hair loss.

Thanks.

- Adam

Comments

philfort wrote on 10/30/2002, 10:43 PM

I've experienced a similar problem, with ridiculous numbers like that showing up. I forget if it was with dropped frames, or the timecode, but it was at some point during capturing. The capture seemed to go fine though, there were no real problems.

I also have a Dell, and a Canon MiniDV (Elura).

p_l wrote on 10/30/2002, 11:15 PM

Yeah, don't worry about the erroneously-reported number of dropped frames if the resulting file plays fine.

But since I see you're both a couple of fellow Canon DV cam users, I was wondering if (and how) you can use one for pass-through, you know, like for capturing from an analog source like a VCR by running an analog in line to the camera while capturing from it via firewire, like some Sonys can. The best I've managed so far was to record analog into the cam first, then capure via firewire while playing the DV tape back. I have a Canon Elura.