DV Capture - dropped frames

Geoff_Wood wrote on 4/17/2005, 9:55 PM
XP Home SP2, P4 2.8G 256MB ram (1G coming tomorrow...), ADS Pyro A/V link on firewire from Video8 source. Same thing happens in Vegas 5 and Adobve Premiere Elements. PAL @25 fps, so no complicationns likely there.

Every minute(ish) the preview screen momentarily freezes and I get around 35 dropped frames. Not tied to scene changes on original video.

All the XP tweaks are done for realtime audio/video optimisation. Separate data drive running at UDMA5.

Any suggestions ?

geoff

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 4/17/2005, 10:08 PM
Don't know the cause, but I never have preview on whilst capturing in case it wastes needed resources - Capture Options > Smart Preview stops Preview as soon as capture starts.

May not make a difference in your case, but worth a try.
Geoff_Wood wrote on 4/17/2005, 10:59 PM
Seems to be reliably 32 frames every 48 seconds or so. Sounds like a Drop Frame sort of thing, but there is no Drop Frame scenario in PAL...

geoff
johnmeyer wrote on 4/18/2005, 12:31 AM
This has a very familar ring to it. I got involved with a thread back in 2003 about dropping 36 frames:

Dropped frames

I provided links in that thread to several other people who reported dropping exactly 36 frames.

Unfortunately, no one ever reported a cure.
DelCallo wrote on 4/18/2005, 6:22 PM
Goeff:
When something similar happened to me, I traced it to a driver for my marble mouse that I loaded from a CD supplied with the device. I deleted that driver and let xp detect my marble mouse and supply its own driver, and the problem went away.

May or may not help your problem, but it's easy enough to try.

Good luck.

Caruso
shogo wrote on 4/18/2005, 8:30 PM
I had a similar issue during capture if I minimized the preview window or then re-maximized it, I always had one or two dropped frames. Check to make sure if your hard drive is running in DMA mode 5 or 6 mine was using DMA Multiword mode 2 and I was getting terrible performance.

How I was able to get it back to DMA mode 5 was to reset my bios to best performance (go figure) This can be tricky if that is what it shows you. Check the device manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers check Primary and the secondary under the advanced settings tab.

My laptop did this as well and that was another story took me forever to get it back to the right DMA mode seems to be an issue with XP if you have more than a few errors reading from a controller it sets the DMA mode way back to make sure it does not get any errors.

Sorry such a long post but maybe it will help you or someone else.