have tried:

selecting different speeds of input

selecting different options on the camera itself

clicking options one by one in different variations until my eyes dried out and I lost all hope.

crying and holding the computer with both hands and begging it not to drop frames.

Nothing worked. If anybody wants to toss a set of variables for options on the editing system, the computer or the camera, or even all three in different combinations, I'll try them. At this point, and after working on this project for over 2 months now, I'm willing to even retry things I've tried all over again. I took a whole week off the project, and now coming back to it, I notice I am still just as frazzled and have no idea what to do (and got a sickening feeling in the pit of my tummy that I just wasted a hundred bucks on a new edit system.)

Frustrated and willing to try anything,
BagOfEyebrows

You know you still haven't really provided very much info to go on.

What do you mean when you say "selecting different speeds of input"?

There's only one speed when capturing from a camcorder connected via firewire - are you capturing via some other method? If so, you need to be more specific about how you're actually capturing.

Choppy looking video in the preview window can be caused by other things than dropped frames - did the capture software you are using actually say it was dropping frames (most/all capture software will have a dropped frames counter)?

--Scott

We figured it out today. All set now with the dropped frame thing. Now we're wondering if there's a way to fast-foward during previewing? Went through the book and every option on the program, can't seem to find a way to fast forward through sections (as they play) when we've gone over the sections for a few months and know they are all set but still want to fast-foward through them to make sure they are all intact.

So what was the solution? It's always useful to post the answers for the next person who has this problem.

The fastforrwarding you want to do is called "scrubbing" - have a look at this thread for how to do it.

Ian G.

The solution would be hard to explain, as it was a case of something working that hadn't worked previously, and by the time we got to the point we had, so many options had been changed, reselected, and changed back, we've no idea how we got it to work, it just worked. I'd say call it luck, but luck usually doesn't take a few 12 hour days of brain overload trying to fix a problem using logic, step by step procedures only to have the whole thing suddenly 'magically' work when the whole process had been tried that way before. I also think it's possible, although not probable, that a little one on one discussion with the computer might have scared the life into this project... let's just say that calling the computer a 'cacahead' and telling it "they are having a sale at Best Buy, and there's this new computer we might get to do this project... you CAN BE REPLACED" might have had something to do with it suddenly working.

Who knows.

Thanks for that link, it sounds like what I'm trying to do could potentially mess up the project and we'd have to start again, which at this point would be kinda funny, in a psychotic "heh heh heh HEHEEHAHAHA, woooooooohooooooooo arrrrrrrrrrrgh" kinda way. None the less, that kind of fear of everything going wrong has been par for the course with this project, so we'll dive right in and go do like that link says and, hey, the project when it's done is going to feel like we just climbed Mount Everest, so who are we to worry or complain?

Fast forwarding though playing footage... I'd have thought they'd have a button for that. The old Pinnacle edit system did. All you had to do was press fast forward while it was playing, and it would zip right along the footage. How come Sony does it differently and more complicatedly? Anybody know? Not picking on Sony here, just wondering why that option isn't there with one click.

Does MS have shuttle keys for keyboard shortcuts? I use the JKL keys a lot in Vegas. K stops the clip playing, L is forward, hitting L again speeds things up, and again, etc. J is reverse.