Its real simple---get another hard drive , install it, format it the same file
allocation as your "c" drive, instruct your capture options to capture to that drive
and its really a piece of cake. Make sure your motherboard can handle the speed
ATA 33,66,100,133--etc. and size of the drive. If you are tentative about openning
the case find a "nerd" friend who will help you.

James J. Kizak

You may not need a 2nd drive to solve the dropped frames issue.

Have you run Defrag on your hard drive lately? I try to run defrag before EVERY capture. If your drive is fragmented, you could drop frames.

Also, if you have other programs running that are accessing the drive during capture, that could cause problems. I recommend disabling antivirus programs during capture, if anything, just to see if it helps.

Now, considering the size of DV, you may *need* a 2nd hard drive to be able to edit, save, and encode your video without running out of room. Since your PC is an Athlon 1Ghz, it should support ATA100 drives. Most drives are backward compatible so a faster drive should work at a slower speed (ATA133, 100, 66, etc). I recommend getting a 7200RPM drive, at least 80GB. That should give you enough space to edit your movies.

I agree with the other poster about finding a friend to help if possible. Adding a drive isn't too difficult, but if you've never done it then it won't be 2nd nature. Hard drives are IDE devices, as are CD ROM/DVD drives or internal Zip drives. Your computer can support 4 IDE devices, so odds are you can add one.

IDE devices connect to the IDE channels on the motherboard (main circuit board). There are two IDE channels and each one can have 2 devices--a master and a slave (for a total of 4). Jumpers on the drives dictate the role it plays. These jumpers are easy to set and should be marked "Master", "Slave", or "Cable Select". Odds are that your current hard drive is the "Master" on IDE Channel 1, and your CD-ROM or DVD drive is "Master" on IDE Channel 2. You can set the jumper on the new hard drive to "Slave" and connect it to Channel 2 to share that channel with the CD-ROM drive. Instructions should be included with a new hard drive, and there will be illustrations to help. :)

An alternate would be to buy a Firewire drive, and then you just have to connect it to your 1394 port and connect power. All done there. :)

Good luck.

Craig

All the above comments are well-intentioned and useful, but the #1 thing that I would check before doing anything else is to verify that you have DMA enabled for that drive. Second thing I'd check is whether your antivirus program is doing a background scan during capture.

Defragging, adding additional drives, etc. are are worthwhile, but as systems get more powerful there is a lot more "headroom", mitigating the need for some of these measures. For example, I NEVER defrag (well, okay, maybe twice a year) and yet I NEVER drop frames. Back in 1998 my K6-2 Compaq had to be nursed along to prevent dropped frames, but my current system just loafs.

Once you get your feet wet, you'll probably want to get an additional huge hard drive, as CraigF mentions. DV sucks up 13GB of drive space for each hour of video. A few years back, this was a serious problem, but these days you can find big drives for about $1 per GB. I wouldn't worry too much about the drive rpm's. Again, contemporary drives are able to sustain such high data rates, it's no longer much of a factor.