DV-Capture suddenly causes "mosaic" during capture

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 3/18/2009, 6:50 AM

Hi,

Im on 8.0c on an inter QuadCode (QX9650) and running on Vista 64. The DV-capture application has worked before like a charm (no issues non whatsoever).

It is a time since I used it the last time (about 6 months) and now I have constant problems during capture.

The capture starts normally and after a while there is occasionally frames where you can see "mosaic" patterns, in cheerful colors. Sometimes also the dropped frames counter is advanced.

I have tried everything that is easy - turning off all backgroun processes, changed both the firewire cable and the DV-source, but this does not help...

Where should I look next?

There has been numerous upgrades from Microsoft since I used the capture application. I have also installed some other software, but not related to firewire, editing nor burning disks...

Typical - things break when you have a deadline. Any ideas what to do next? Must I re-install Vegas and do I loose some settings if doing so?

Grateful for any input :)

Cheers, Christian

EDIT:
I think I have found at leas the mechanism for the problem: everything works fine as long I am capturing to my two internal sata disks. When I capture to an external USB disk then the problem arises.

This IS a Vista problem. After some upgrades Vista 64 Ultimate turned VERY slow on all USB and FireWire ports. There has been some discussions about this in other forums. Before my external USB 2.0 disk read rates vere about 30MByte/s. Now they are barely 12MByte/s. My Firewire800 interface speed has also about halved. Something is really wrong. 12MByte/s should be high enough to write a DV-stream of 25Mbits/s. Something spooky is going on behind the scenes. I certainly hope that the SP2 for Vista 64 will fix this. Till then, just capturing to Sata disks....aaarghhh.... Vista stinks!

Comments

farss wrote on 3/18/2009, 7:45 AM

I wouldn't say this was even a Vista problem. One of my 'students' had ongoing problems with renders from a USB drive doing the exact same thing. At first I thought it was a tape dropout but no, source files were pristine. It was definately happening during the render. Switched from USB to firewire drive and never a problem again and he's running XP.

Bob.

fldave wrote on 3/18/2009, 8:14 AM

I never use USB disks to capture to. I have not had good luck with USB for other than offline storage. I never edit clips from USB drives directly on my timeline. Other people have had no problems, but I have had nothing but problems, including trashing all data on the drives.

Firewire, SATA or even IDE is what I use.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 3/18/2009, 8:58 AM

Hi,

I fully understand your caution using USB drives. I try to avoid that also, but is not always possible. Ironically, up to today I have never had any issues with USB drives on my fast computer. Not during capturing, neither rendering. As long as the disks perform fairly fast.

There is certainly soemthing wrong in my Vista 64 since this problem happens when I am capturing to a FireWire800 external disk. This disk used to have a read performace of 78MByte/s, now when I tested it only goes up to 35MByte/s.

So something very weird is going on in Vista 64 - this speed shoud still be high enough to capture DV-material...

Christian

musicvid10 wrote on 3/18/2009, 10:09 AM

Go to Device Manager and delete the capture card. Reboot and Windows will find it again.
This should set the registry entries back to the driver defaults.
50% of the time, that is all that is necessary to get a cranky interface card working again.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 3/18/2009, 11:13 AM

Hi,

I have no capture card - I am capturing via FireWire from a Canon MXV2i with analog input.

Would your statement still be valid in this case???

Somehow I don't believe this is the reason, since capturin to sata drives works like a charm, only USB and FireWire are troublesome. I want to emphasize that the camera and the external HD uses differen firewire ports.

Christian

musicvid10 wrote on 3/18/2009, 11:57 AM

"Would your statement still be valid in this case???"

Yes. by "capture card" I was referring to your "Firewire 800" device. Makes no difference if it is internal or a card. No promises, but it does no harm to try.

"I want to emphasize that the camera and the external HD uses differen firewire ports."

Different ports on the same card, or different cards? Again, I use the term "card" in the generic sense to mean "device," just a bad habit, I guess.