This brings me to a question I have had for a year or so. Why, when there is device control, is there no automatic retry to recapture the place where the dropped frames occurred? This seems logical, since the software obviously notices it immediately, it is marking (creating) clips and knows exactly where the affected clip starts, so why not just back up, take a running start, and try again a few times. If it fails after, say 6 times, give information in an on screen notice and a printable file detailing the exact location (clip number) where the problem(s) occurred.

Frames are being dropped steadily during the capture. All the footage is essentially talking heads. I'll lose maybe 10 frames during an hour long capture. Not a huge deal, but just curious.
thanks
-D

I routinely get dropped frames until I unplug the network cable from the machine. I have an onboard NIC and it seems to be the culprit. When the machine is not conected to the network, no dropped frames even on a 2 hour capture!

I was wondering. Might try that on my next capture. Thanks!
-D

Depends on your hardware, but to get zero dropped frames I make sure screen-saver is off, that I'm running Always On under power options, and finally (this is with my 650 mhz laptop) I have to completely shut it down and then restart it, then go right into the capture process. I'll be switching everything to my Ath 1800 desktop soon, and hopefully I won't have to go through all that.

I NEVER get any dropped frames.

Are you using a seperate hard drive for capture/print to tape?

Did you disable any TSR applications like screen savers, anti-virus?

Are you on a network?

Did you disable any power management?

Did you touch your keybaord or mouse?

Any of the above can cause dropped frames.

I can't get a decent capture UNLESS I use a separate HD for capture. Interesting.

I do have a separate 120gig video drive, but it's a 5400 rpm drive. I read on CNET that there is no real difference between the 5400 and the 7200 drives, so I figured I'd give it a try. I am tempted to pick up a 7200 just to see if I can pick up the remaining frames that way.

I did disable Norton Antivirus and got better results as well as unplugging myself from the network. Screensaver is off, but I haven't checked power options. I'm dropping maybe 10-12 frames now on a 50 minute capture, so it's not mission critical. My source material is shot on a Canon GL1 and captured through a Panasonic mini-DV deck connected via firewire. I usually delete any unneeded files and dfrag the harddrive before capturing.

One other thing I've noticed that I'm not sure is normal is that when capturing, the counter in the Vegas Capture window (lower right hand side of the screen) seems to run for a few seconds, pause, then run again, basically cycling through the entire capture. Is this normal or is it a sign of something else lurking in RAM I need to fix? BTW, I'm running 512Mb of RAM.
-D

A couple of thoughts:

I seem to recall that VV3(b) had a problem with indicated dropped frames that VV3(c) corrected.

512MB of ram is way more than you need. I have 256MB, and my RAMPage utility running in the system tray says that only 150MB of that is used during capture. And this is with about 40 processes running in the background along with VV3.

A 5400rpm drive is fine. The issue these days is not the speed, but the data transfer rate. Back on my old system (1998) my hard drive had trouble keeping up with the 4MB/sec data rate of DV. These days, any recent drive probably specs out at greater than 20MB/sec. That's plenty.

Your CPU is probably a major factor. I'm sure that, say, a 350MHz processor can be made to work with video capturing, but only IF one is very careful about killing off any other processes so the PC is focused exclusively on the video stream. There is a utility called "EndItAll" that makes it very easy to temporarily close out all the other programs running in the background.

Or just get a faster PC.

I'm running a 1.6 ghz P4 under the hood. What would be the recommended minimum for this?

thanks!
_D

I'm not sure, but I do all my capturing on my wife's old P2-350 using SCLive with no dropped frames. Even when I capture analog audio at the same time. Antivirus software makes no difference, though I always try to turn it off if I remember.

OTOH, my last 2 P4s (1.8G & 2.2G) just can't seem to handle it, so clearly processor speed has little to do with it.

I've heard that moving the firewire card to a different PCI slot will sometimes make a difference.

I had problems with dropped frames in the beginning, and it drove me crazy until someone gracefully suggested that I capture on a drive other than where Windows resided (So I capture to D:), and render to a driver other than there the capture is located (So I render to C:) The smiles are intentional. I have not dropped a single frame in months. I am astonished at how reliable it is, expecially since I "often" forget to cancel background processes.

Hey AVgeek,

I just installed a WD 120 Gig Special Edition drive and it rocks. Before I was having the same issue. When capturing uncompressed video I was losing 10 frames a min on P4 1.6 with a WD 60 Gig 5400. Now it's not dropping any frames and my CPU usage during capture is 8%. The only issue is I can only capture 1 1/2 hours of video on the drive as it only formats to 111 Gig's.

I need to be able to capture 3 hours worth of video. But that's my problem. :)

Hey Buc,

Why uncompressed?

MPH

Are you capturing uncompressed? I can do around 8 hours on mine using DV.

I can understand capturing to a separate drive, but rendering to one? May need to give that some thought.
-D