Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 1/5/2005, 11:12 AM
Well, you'll definitely know it when you see it, Mr. C!

Inputting video from your camcorder and exporting it back from your computer are two of the most data intensive tasks you can do. Although faster computers, more memory and faster hard drives are making it less of an issue (especially for DV camcorders connected via firewire), any interrupted can bugger up the data flow and, for a moment, knock your camcorder and computer out of sync (though, once it's out of sync, it generally stays out of sync until you stop the capture). When this happens, frames are dropped. In other words, when you watch the video you've captured, it looks all jumpy.

On some relatively slower computers (say, under 2 ghz) even a background task can cause frames to be dropped. Virus software is notorious for doing it. So is WindowsXP's indexing. So can having your computer hooked up to a network or to the internet via an always-on connection.

As I said, this is becoming less of an issue with today's computers. But, with my old 1.3 ghz computer, I had to shut down all the background tasks before I could even hope to get a clean capture. With my Hyperthreading Pentium 4 with lots of RAM, it's not even an issue.

Other things that can cause dropped frames are spyware or malware or an improperly installed hard drive.

Generally, when I'm doing a capture, I set my options to abort the capture as soon as a frame is dropped. (Otherwise, you get report afterward that says frames were dropped and you've wasted your time.)

If it ever becomes an issue, there are a number of remedies on this forum, or we'll be able to help you address some specific problems.
cbrillow wrote on 1/5/2005, 11:18 AM
Not sure about Movie Studio, as I use Vegas, but most applications will tally dropped frames as they occur during capture. There are different reasons that frames are dropped, ranging from poor analog source material to problems with your system hardware. A dropped video frame occurs when the incoming video information cannot be successfully assembled into a useable frame.

In brief, your goal should be 0 dropped frames. If you're using a DV source, such as a camcorder feeding a 1394 interface, this is the norm. In this case, a small number of dropped frames could indicated an interruption in the source tape's timecode. If the timecode is uninterrupted and there are a significant number of dropped frames reported, overall system speed or a capture drive that is not DMA-enabled could be at-fault.

If you're using a capture card to digitize analog source material, such as a VHS tape, dropped frames may result from older, degraded tapes or areas on the tape where two different recordings overlapped. In general, a few dropped frames created by this situation can often be acceptable, but the fewer the better.

Dropped frames can lead to problems with audio/video sync in subsequent video processing steps.
Mr_Christopher wrote on 1/5/2005, 11:33 AM
Thanks guys! Now I get it :-)

Chris