It has been some time since I first wrote about this problem, but I still have it, and my old VV3 works fine on the same computer. Let me explain my situation a little first. I am an amateur working alone at home with nobody to turn to for advice, except these forums and the computer shop, which is beginning to cost mucho bucks. I work mainly on home and club videos, which I enter in competitions.
I first noticed the problem when I wanted to do a little extra editing on a video that I had previously completed on VV3. I recaptured the video from tape and made the changes I wanted. But in doing so I noticed that there were many dropped frames. I spent about a day deleting these and rejoining the many fractured clips together which seemed to render OK. But then when I transferred it to tape there were dozens more dropped frames. It was now too late for the competition I wished to enter so I sent the older version of my video.

In reply to my original message SonyEPM suggested that I defrag my drive. I frequently defrag both drives and they showed no defrag necessary, but did I did so anyway and that made no difference. I even went to Norton Speed Disc, which does a much better job, and that didn't help. I then uninstalled VV4 and reinstalled it, and that didn't help either.

I had another competition coming up so I thought I would start wth a fresh slate on a new video, taking carefull note of what I was doing. Immediately on Download it started showing 1 or 2 Dropped Frames, sometimes as frequently as every 5-10 frames. Other times the counter would jump by 15-20 Dropouts, but when I went back to find them none were evident. The Dropped Frame counter seemed to bear no relation to the actual dropped frames. Sometimes it would go almost a minute with no Dropouts. I struggled with this for a couple of days and just gave up. I was convinced by now that it must be the computer so I took it back to the shop. The technician there is very good and I stayed there for a day working with him. I was able to demonstrate to him very easily how VV4 was dropping frames during capture. I'm not a computer afficianado so I don't know all that he was doing, but he was working away quite diligently. I know he disabled all the programs that VV4 didn't need to run, but nothing he did made any difference. We Uninstalled and then Reinstalled VV4 yet again with no improvement. VV3 was still installed in the computer we tried that and it worked perfectly. I took some video shots inside the shop and captured them - no dropouts. I put the clips on the Timeline and did a little editing, and then Rendered it. Still perfect. I printed to tape and was still OK. We then Opened VV4 and Imported those same VV3 files and put them on the VV4 Timeline with no problem. I then printed them to tape in my camcorder and Dropouts became evident. At this point we uninstalled the VV4 and gave up. I brought the computer home and have since confirmed that VV3 is working perfectly, except that it will not recognise files that were captured on VV4.

I am now thoroughly exhausted and don't know where to turn next. Can anybody help me?

I am still trying to solve my problem and it occurs to me that it may depend on the definition of "Dropped Frames", which suggests to me missed frames. What I am experiencing may be better described as "Freeze Frames". If I expand the Timeline out to show individual frames it is easy to pick out frames where the audio goes to a straight line at 0 db. Checking the video frame this is a repeat of the previous one. These occur in ones and twos, sometimes as close as five frames apart. This causes a jerkiness in the action and breakup of the audio. I should also point out that the Dropped Frame counter is ratcheting up all the time, sometime in increments of 15 and 55 frames.

Could thishave anything to do with the settings in VV4, which I kept at the original defaults?

Is this the same tape you are trying to capture? Or does it also happen on all previous tapes that used to work fine.

JBJones

Ron

I had this same problem at first and I honestly can't remember what I did to fix the problem.

I'm like you, an amateur and not really that computer savvy. I'm not at home right now, but when I get to my home computer, I will see if I can figure out what I did and get back to you.

Good luck!

Thanks for your replies, guys. Let me first say that while at the computer shop we used the same tape throughout. We first of all captured several minutes of raw footage on VV4.0D, during which the DF counter inched up 1-2 DFs at a time at first but this eventually increased to 14 and 55 each time. We then captured from the same tape onto VV3 with no DFs at all and printed it back to tape also with no glitches. Yesterday I captured, edited and rendered a six minute video on the VV3 with no problems at all.
I cannot try the VV4 at the moment because I have not reinstalled yet, but I will do so tomorrow. I will install VV4.0A from the disc first of all to test that. Then I will install the 4.0D upgrade and check that out.

If Vegas 3 can capture and print,

and Vegas 4 on the identical machine cannot,

check your paths. Are both capture apps saving files to the same drive? If not, set Vegas 4 to capture to the same drive as Vegas 3.

Also, I may have missed it, but what capture card and camera/deck are you using?

VV3 is, and VV4 was in the same folder at C:/Sonic Foundry. I will reinstall VV4 later today. When at the computer shop all the work; capture, edit and render, were done in the same new folder on the D drive.

The capture card is listed in my Device Manager as; Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant 1394 Controller. I don't know how to get more specific than that.

The camera/deck is a Sony DRV 510 NTSC.

I installed trial version of Vegas 4 last night for the first time and tried capturing from my Canon DV cam. For one hour tape I had 56 dropped frames. I did not know what to expect so I thought this is normal! I have used Roxio's Videowave moviemaker to capture the same tape and it did not report any problem. However, I am not sure if Videowave will report the droped frames even if it occurs.

I have been messing about with this all afternoon and just made an amazing discovery. First of all I re-installed the VV4a from the disc and started working with that, and it showed dropped frames immediately. I captured three minute segments from several raw tapes and one completely finished video that I know is good. They all showed DFs., of a roughly similar pattern. Sometimes jumps of 1 or 2 frames, other times as many as 50, or more frames. Then I realised the fifty jumps were only occurring when I was moving the mouse, so I scrubbed it around a bit and very soon the DF counter was near 200. But when I finshed the capture session the Session Statistics window was only showing in the range of 9 to 48. I tried this again with three different mouses (mice?) with exactly the same result. They all showed 50 to 200 DFs.with just a little scrubbing around.

Can anybody help me and explain why this is happening in the first place. And why does it only happen with VV4 and not VV3?

RonR

Since I upgraded from VV3 to VV4, drop frames exist. I use P4-2.4, 512MRAM. Drops are in the first 10 secs capture and 8-9 drops each time. No more drops after that...

I think during creation of the captured file or in some reason in the first 10 sec period HD is working on something else beside capturing and that causes the drop frames in my case...

Hey Prototype,
Try something for me. I found exactly the same as you. Small increments of DFs of up to eight several times in the first second or two. After discovering the DFs going up when moving the mouse I concluded these DFs are probably due to me moving the mouse slightly after clicking on Capture. I also concluded that the DF increment of 55, which occured many times near the end of a capture was due to my moving the cursor from where it was parked at the Capture button to the Stop button.
Please try moving your mouse around and check if you see anything similar.
Thanks. RonR

I tried what you said. My mouse movement no effect on capturing, did not make any change on te number of drop frames. Maybe you should update your mouse software or use the default mouse driver.

I unchecked the "Minimum Clip Lenght" option in Capture/options/preferences/capture. I changed the path from drive D to drive C path in Disk management. Now I get sometimes 2-3 frame drops, sometimes not at all. I dont know what excatly causing the drop frames, but I used Ulead softwares, Pinnacle, Cyberlink softwares and even Vegas v.3 before, but never had such drop frames problem as in Vegas v.4. I am still checking every options and by trial-error trying to get rid of the problem completely...

Hay Ron,

Just a shot in the dark...try disconnecting your mouse, and using Ctrl+R on the keyboard to start the capture (and Space bar to stop).

Jon

RonR:

I had a problem similar to yours (think I was running VV3x at the time). You don't say what mouse you are using, but I would check the driver. I use a Logitech marble type pointing device, and, the Logitech specific driver will not coexist with Vegas on my machine.

Not only did it interfere with my capture, but if I tried keeping the pointer in constant motion (say a slow circular motion), I could actually observe as some incompatability with that driver would interupt the motion of the pointer - as though my entire computer would freeze just for a fraction of a second.

If you're crunching numbers on a spreadsheet, obviously, this is no problem. For capturing video, it is a nightmare (equally problematic when printing to tape).

I used the device manager in WinXP to remove my mouse completely, rebooted and allowed XP to detect my mouse and install it's "best" (closest match) driver, and the problem disappeared.

I have subsequently tried reinstalling the Logitech driver and confirmed for myself that it was the source of the problem on my machine, so, once again, I removed it via the process described above.

It doesn't make sense to me that VV3 would work fine while V4 won't, but perhaps it's due to some overhead threshold that gets crossed with V4 and not V3 on your machine that then causes incompatability between your mouse driver and Vegas (pure speculation here, slay me not, you expert types, LOL).

I have run VV3 (through all versions) and now V4 on my machine (more modest by far than yours) with no other glitches, so I assume that your problem is specific to your setup and not the result of any V4 bug.

Hope this helps, and let us no when you solve this problem what the solution turned out to be (you WILL solve the problem).

Good luck

Caruso

I may be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel here. It occured to me that there IS a difference between my set up for VV3 and VV4 that I had overllooked. Last month I won a scripting plug-in for Vegas as a door prize at a club meeting. At the time I was running on VV3, but this plug-in would only run on VV4, so I installed VV4, which I already had in my possesion. I also installed the plug-in. I was just completing a project so it was a couple of weeks before I did any capturing and the dropped frames problem only then became apparent. The rest of the story you can read in my posts to this thread.
Anyway, getting back to the plug in. My thought was that as it would only work with VV4, maybe it could be causing the drop outs on VV4 and not on VV3. I uninstalled the plug-in and things did change on VV4. No longer did the DF counter rise when I moved the mouse around. I made a number of quick 2-3 minute captures and the first couple showed no dropouts, even when I moved the mouse around. Subsequent captures did show 1-2 drop outs, but nothing like previously. I haven't had a chance to do any more work since then. At this time I am not blaming the plug-in, but maybe this latest information will give somebody an idea what is going on and help me with it. I will be contacting the plug in manufacturer.

RonR

Ron:

Just out of curiousity, what is the plug-in?

Frenchy

I have the exact same problem with df's on VV 4.0d. I thought it was the tape, but then I tried a new tape last night and had like 270 df's for 1 hr of video. This is frustrating to say the least.

Ohhhh, I'm so glad this has been brought back to light!!! The topic for DFs in V4 has been started numerous times, but was never paid attention to. I've started couple of them myself with no avail.
I have DFs too. And it's not the drivers, not the mouse, not the HD. I'm the computer guy and I did everything (or pretty much close to it) that you can do to increase performance (which was not really needed in my system):
disabled almost all services
defragged HD
made sure all HDs are spinning before starting capture (like running diskeeper right before it)
unloaded every program that could be unloaded
disabled all visual effects in XP
enabled/disabled Hyper threading
played with the registry making XP not to page kernel to disk and to leave all operating system files in RAM....
Besides, did i really need to do all this??? My system is Dual P4 2.4, with 2Gb of ECC RAM, 10 SCSI Ultra 360 hard drives span in RAID-0 through hardware RAID adapter (Adaptec 2010s). Capture done through Creative Gamer sound card fire wire port.
What i noticed though that all DFs occure when there is high camera movement, jerkiness. Like, let's say you hold the camera recording and then start walking not compensating for your steps, not softing the step's up and down movement. So, i will get couple of DFs everytime you make a step, everytime your foot steps on the ground, making camera shakes, there will be drop frames....
So, this said, i just opened myself for - "it's the camera!!!" comments. Nope!!!
captured the EXACT SAME episode, using SAME CAMERA, with exact same setup but using V3... NO DROP FRAMES!!!! Not even one!
Here is the puzzle for you guys. I, as many others participating in this thread, will be so thrilled to find a resolution to all this.
Thanks in advance,
With Regards,
CR

Forgot to mention the camera. It's Sony DCR TRV-103

Thanks CR. Boy, am I glad a computer oriented person is joining this thread. I am so frustrated by all of this I haven't tried to do any serious capturing with VV4 for some time now. I have gone back to VV3, which works perfectly, with everything camerawise, computerwise and methodologywise exactly the same. I wrote directly to SonySoFo about this problem a week ago and have received no response from them. I wrote to the author of the plug-in who assures me there is no way his text file can affect capture. And I believe him.
He writes; "I do not know your system specs but suspect there is SOMETHING wrong somewhere with the setup. First of all, what kind of Firewire card do you have? If VIA, can you try some other card? Secondly, is it using the Microsoft driver? Not a TI or a VIA driver. Third, do you have any VIA chipsets on the motherboard? If yes, do you have the latest drivers? (I believe the "4 in 1" is an imprtant one to be current). Do you have DMA active on the hard drives? What about the mouse driver? Video driver? Audio driver? All of these systems can affect capture. However, I can guarantee that a 1500 line text file will NOT affect capture."

I am not a computer person. I do not directly know the answers to any of those questions. To me a computer is just a tool (fantastic though it may be) that the less I need to know about what's inside it, and how it works, the better I like it. I will contact my computer tecnician again to see if he can help, but he is not into the requirements of video editing software, so does not always have the answers I am looking for.

RonR

RonR:

Go to Start>control panel>system>device manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Right click on each listed IDE channel>advanced settings.

Transfer mode should say "DMA if available" for all of the listed IDE channels. If it says PIO mode anywhere- set it to "DMA if available".

Sorry if you've answered this elsewhere.

Is there some chance that the script files Ron mentioned is staying in memory somehow?

Since these things have been mentioned a supicious I'd try un-installing the mouse and letting windows choose it's own driver. Go to device manager and remove the mouse.

Take all of your script files and move them to another location. Don't tell V4 where they are.

Other time saving hints:
1. It's possible to get perfect captures in V4. I do it regularly on a 2.0GHz P4 and a 1.0GHz PIII
2. I always have to disable my network interface to get a perfect capture.
3. You can use a custom view in the clip explorer of sfvidcap. In the custom view you can choose to see which clips had dropped frames. You can mark these for batch capture and try again.
4. #3 above won't help with print to tape
5. #3 only works if you capture from a DV deck or camera, use scene detection. If you use scene detection you probably don't need to set a file size limit.

Your problem sounds like it's a bit more than an ordinary dropped frame problem. Something is causing enough activity to interupt sfvidcap. If it's the mouse then maybe the driver is a problem. Or, if you want to be paranoid, how about some adware, a virus, or maybe even anti-virus software.

If you run a system monitor and look at CPU activity do you get any hints? do you see anything as you mouse around?

Here are a few programs I've used on the paranoia front: Lavasoft's adaware to check for advertising software, Zonealarm to catch programs that want to call home (Vegas is one of them. It's harmless but you still might block it just on principle) and AVG antivirus. AVG has low overhead. I run it while I capture and have no trouble at all.

Adaware and Zonealarm might be the most useful.

Rob Mack