Dropping frames after switching from FAT32 w/98 to NTFS w/XP

lukearndt wrote on 11/6/2004, 10:29 PM

Hey guys. I've been having a frustrating probelm with dropping frames.

Up until the past couple of weeks, I have been using Windows 98 SE (with FAT 32, of course). I upgraded to XP, formatted all of the drives to NTFS, and now I'm having problems capturing. I have a 7200 WD 160 GB hard drive that is my capture drive and an 80 GB drive as my main drive -- where XP is installed. The problem is my computer seems to be much more susceptible to dropping frames. For instance, simply browsing the web will increase the drop frame total, whereas in 98 I had no such problem. I might drop 130 or so frames after capturing 15 minutes, and the number dropped seems to increase by five or so every little bit. If I leave the computer totally alone while capturing, I'm able to get the video with no dropped frames. I'm just wondering what's causing the computer to be more sensitive!

Here are my specs:

P4 2.4 GHz
768 MB DDR ram
C: drive - 80 GB (Windows XP)
D: drive - 60 GB
E: drive - 160 GB (capture drive)

The DMA settings are correct. I disabled system restore for both the D: and E: drive.

If anybody has any suggestions, I would very much appreciate it!

Thanks,

Luke

Comments

ritsmer wrote on 11/6/2004, 10:56 PM

Maybe following tips could help: http://www.tweakfactor.com/articles/tweaks/xptweak/3.html
They should lower the overhead and keep larger parts of the kernel in the memory.
Pls also check the use of the swapfile (ctrl-alt-del once) and maybe it could help to make it a fixed length file to avoid XP using time to expand/decrease it all the time..
Also see the answers to a similiar topic here: "Dropping Frames"

lukearndt wrote on 11/7/2004, 9:41 PM

Thanks for the reply and the suggestions. I checked out those links, and none of those suggestions seem to resolve the problem. I'm really perplexed. It seemed to be much less "picky," I'll say, in WIndows 98. I even tried installing MovieStudio on my D: drive and capturing to my E: with the similar results. Write caching is disabled as well as indexing for all three hard drives.

If anybody has any other suggestions I sure would appreciate it. Thanks a bunch.

IanG wrote on 11/8/2004, 12:36 AM

It might be worth getting a copy of Sandra and seeing what the performance of your disks is like.

Ian G.

lukearndt wrote on 11/8/2004, 8:50 AM

I tried out Sandra, and I got a 45 MB/s on my E: drive. I also tried capturing to my D: drive with similar results -- dropping frames here and there. This is really baffling because I don't understand what has changed since I switched from Windows 98!

Thanks for the help. Any other ideas would be appreciated.

IanG wrote on 11/8/2004, 10:20 AM

It doesn't look there's a problem with your disk speed! Was your firewire card supplied with a driver, and are there any updates available for XP?

Ian G.

Moebius wrote on 11/8/2004, 7:01 PM

How about real time antivirus software?

I had to disable Norton's Protected Recycle Bin when capturing and AutoProtect. I'm not sure if one or both were necessary, but I shut them both off and stopped having a problem.

And you don't have the Indexing service running, right?

lukearndt wrote on 11/9/2004, 7:52 PM

IanG: I'm using the the default or generic drivers, I guess. In Device Manager I get: "OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller." I've had the PCI firewire card for a few years now, and I'm not exactly sure if it came with its own drivers or what. And I recently ran Windows Update, and I think I'm up-to-date on all the critical updates.

Moebius: I don't currently have any A/V software installed. And, right, the drive indexing is turned off for all three hard drives.

I appreciate the suggestions, guys! I'd be open to trying anything else you might come up with.

Luke

lukearndt wrote on 11/22/2004, 6:30 PM

I'm wondering if anybody else has any ideas. I'm just so confused as to why I would have problems dropping frames in XP. I think I have plenty of speed, RAM and storage space on my computer. I have tried physically moving the firewire card to a different PCI slot -- no success.

Could updating the capture card drivers do the trick? If so, any idea where I could find those?

One observation I made that's kind of interesting... the dropped frames seem to occur in "chunks." And, up to now, I can't find anything specific that causes dropped frames to occur. If I leave the computer completely untouched, it might capture without dropping a frame. If I do use the computer, the frames seem to drop out every now and then in chunks of five, 10 or more.

Just to try to isolate the problem, I decided to render a DV avi to each hard drive while I was capturing to see if any given drive caused the dropping. I rendered to C:, D: and E: while capturing to E:, and there was no droppage with any of the three! And I even opened a bunch of programs (Word, Firefox, Movie Studio, Photo Draw, Front Page, etc.) while capturing, and that didn't seem to affect the capture. So all in all, it seems to be pretty random.

I currently have XP installed on the C: drive, Movie Studio installed on D:, and E: is my capture drive. Should I change anything? Suggestions are very much appreciated. I'm just stumped right about now.

IanG wrote on 11/23/2004, 12:57 AM

It might help if you run Task Manager at the same time that you're capturing and see if you can spot another app using resources. If you're only dropping a few frames at a time it's probably happening too quickly to spot, but you never know! If nothing else, you may spot a process that shouldn't be there

Enditall's a popular app for killing off unwanted processes and is worth running. Get hold of a copy of Mike Lin's Startup Manager and see what's included at startup. BTW, it's run from the Control Panel, not as a normal app.

Are you doing anything with a CD/DVD drive while you're capturing (e.g. playing music) - that could slow things down.

Ian G.

kgondor wrote on 11/23/2004, 8:23 AM

You may want to try updating your BIOS. When I was running Win/ME I had no problems with dropped frames. After upgrading to XP, the frame dropping started. After updating the BIOS all frame dropping stopped.

Ken

Cippico wrote on 12/21/2004, 4:49 AM

You may want to experiment with changing the block size of the hard drives. Unfortunately the only way to do this is to re-format them. In XP, use Disk Administrator to delete the partition (say, on the 160GB drive) and then re-create it. At some point during either the partition creation or re-format wizard it will ask what block size to use. As you will be mainly be dealing with huge video files I would choose the largest block size (64k, I think?). This means that there will be more efficient writing of large files to that drive.

Good luck.