Dropped Frames -- Lost Cause???

bebobobbins wrote on 11/19/2002, 1:50 PM
I'm capturing video from my DV camera using an older machine. Super Socket 7 mother board with AMD K-2 450 MHz processor and 256Megs RAM. ANd lo and behold frames are dropping, let's just say more than 1 or 2 a second. Enough so a rendered mpeg is a little choppy and noticeably faster. The web site says system requirements are 400MHz and 128MB of RAM.

Is this just a lost cause?

Or should I go through the list:
- Is DMA enabled (??) on my IDE hard drive
- is the 1394 card on a lone IRQ (is ACPI turned off)
- Get the latest drivers for my motherboard (see if UDMA/ATAPI ones exist)

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 11/19/2002, 2:09 PM
Does your older machine have a seperate hard drive for video work? If you're trying to capture to your root partition, you run the risk of dropped frames. I have a very fast high end system and if I attempt to capture to the root partition, it will immediately start to drop frames. If I capture to my 2nd drive, never have any dropped frames.

Ideal: OS, applications on primary drive. Partition as you like.
Capature and print to tape to/from a physically seperate hard drive on the 2nd IDE channel. Doesn't hurt to check the items on your laundry list either if your machine is really old.
bebobobbins wrote on 11/19/2002, 2:15 PM
Thanks for the reply, but yes I have a seperate 7200rpm 80Gig hard drive that I've dedicated to video (and audio). And I have recently upgraded to Windows2000, so the root is relatively clean. But I may just go through the list and see if I can't find anything to improve my situation. When I turn off the screen preview (and monitor on my camera) it helps.
Former user wrote on 11/19/2002, 2:37 PM
If you are trying to monitor the audio during capture, turn this off also. This eats a lot of CPU cycles.

Dave T2
Ruud wrote on 11/20/2002, 7:16 AM
I use a 433mhz pentium celeron with a second harddrive. No lost frames
bebobobbins wrote on 11/29/2002, 1:15 PM
I've been slaving away at the problem. I wrote zeroes to a 8Gb 5400rpm Caviar WEstern Digital Drive and reinstalled the Op System. Now I can dump video to that drive and no lost frames, and editing is smooth; it's lovely.

But when I try to capture video to my 80Gb 7200rpm Barracuda drive I lose frames. Even if I capture to the 8GB drive and move it over I have latency issues when viewing the clips. Talked to computer techs and the said put the two hard drives each on their own motherboard IDE controller. I did and problem is not solved.

So I'm functional and half way there, just have to figure out how to solve the latency problem.