Dropped frames

bspaz wrote on 1/26/2004, 6:30 PM
Hi another newbie here. I am having trouble capturing video on my secondary hard drive. Capturing to my primary hard drive works fine. As soon as I try to capture to my secondary hard drive I drop frames like crazy. I am on XP, 2.6 P4, 512 megs of RAM. Secondary HD is 7200 RPM 8MB caching IDE. If anyone can offer any suggestions I am all hears. I bought the second HD because it was recommended but it has been nothing but trouble!!
I am using sony mini DV and firewire.
P.S. if I use windows movie maker everything seems to be okay. Audio and video appear normal. I don't see a drop frame counter on movie maker.

Comments

SonyTSW wrote on 1/26/2004, 6:45 PM
Make sure DMA is enabled for your second hard drive.

Here's a Knowledge Base article that should help:
How to ensure successful DV Capture and Print to Tape.
bspaz wrote on 1/26/2004, 7:21 PM
Yes both the primary and secondary IDE DMA are enabled.
rextilleon wrote on 1/26/2004, 7:44 PM
Is that drive an external or internal drive? Is it defragmented. Is your bios up to date?
bspaz wrote on 1/26/2004, 7:59 PM
It is an internal HD. I defraged yesterday and I went to gateway and downloaded the updated bios.
kentwolf wrote on 1/27/2004, 1:24 AM
If you are using your primary operating system for video capture, there is a LOT of stuff running in the background that can interrupt a capture.

If you were to CTRL-ALT-DEL and end all non-essential processes, you'd be OK.

A better way is to make a dual boot system with a pretty much stripped OS disk partition with no non-essentials installed, except for maybe your video editing software plus your capture app..

Then you can capture all day with no dropped frames.

Example: When Norton Utilities check various drives for various things, it will cause dropped frames; even when done in the background. DiskKeeper (defrag utility) when just checking the fragmentation level of the drives will also cause dropped frames. I am sure there are many more.

Dual-boot system with dedicated capture partition = no capture problems at all.
bspaz wrote on 1/27/2004, 5:27 AM
Here is something else... I also have studio 8. I uninstalled it before installing vegas. I was able to capture to the secondary HD. I reinstalled it last night and tried again. It is also dropping on the capture. Studio 8 has a data test well my secondary shows 3703 Kbytes read, 3691 write. The primary HD shows 36966 read, 32520 write. This is a huge difference. So I don't think it is just OS or other programs running. I run no other programs and I have tried shutting the firewall and anti-virus down.
bspaz wrote on 1/27/2004, 7:59 AM
I fixed the problem. I went into the BIOS and could not find my secondary HD. I found the primary HD and DVDRAM. My primary HD is a serial HD. The secondary is an IDE. I set the second one up as a slave. I removed and reinstalled the secondary but this time set it up as a master. The BIOS now sees the drive and I can transfer at 57261 Kbytes. Thanks to all of those who responed!