External NTSC Monitor - Dropped Frames

merkabah wrote on 6/28/2004, 1:57 PM
As a new member of this forum, I made a diligent search of "The Subject That Will Not Die" thread before deciding to send this post. My apologies if these issues have been addressed previously. When I connected a friend's PVM-14M4U monitor to my VAIO RS430G via firewire and a PD-150, and previewed a completed, fully prerendered project, I noticed a lot of dropped frames, and not only on scenes that use media or motion FX. These same scenes preview smoothly on my Viewsonic monitor, and on DVDs burned on the VAIO. I'm contemplating buying a used PVM-14N6U monitor. Would the Canopus ADVC-100 provide better D/A conversion than my PD-150? Or is the symptom caused by other factors? I'm shooting and editing fundraising and educational videos for small nonprofit organizations, and I'd like to give them the best possible results even at very low budgets.

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/28/2004, 2:57 PM
The monitor type has nothing to do with the dropped frames. Dropped frames are relevant to the 1394 card, system resources, occasionally the converter device, and what's happening in the background of your OS.
When you print to tape or view rendered regions, or view non-processed vid on your monitor, you should never see dropped frames. If you do, then your monitor settings are wrong, or the above issues are prevailing.
Set your monitor preview setting in Vegas to Preview, and you should see dropped frames go away if the dropped frames aren't related to the above suggested issues.
merkabah wrote on 6/28/2004, 10:44 PM
Thanks very much for the response, Spot. I made sure Video Preview in Vegas was set to Preview, but unfortunately, that didn't resolve the problem. My LCD computer monitor is connected with a DVI cable, and the rendered sequences do not drop frames when previewed on that monitor, only when sent via firewire to an external NTSC monitor. I did check that the rendered sequences spiked the CPU usage up to 40%. Does this usage spike indicate a need for more RAM? Vegas was the only program open and running during the test. PC is a VAIO 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM and a standard NEC 1394 controller, camcorder is a PD-150.
willisub wrote on 6/30/2004, 2:26 PM
I have problems previewing with 3 different Canon camera's via firewire. I can record ok, even with the blue frame popping up every few seconds.

I'm amazed that this type of issue isn't resolved. It happens on a 2.8 ghz laptop and a dual xeon 2.4 HP workstation. I have tried different firewire cards and cables.

I'm not a novice, but this one has me puzzeled. I am trying to borrow some other converter or firewire deck to try to get preview to work.

If it isn't a setting or operator error, then this matter needs to be fixed.

Doesn't seem to be much concern about this problem as it isn't a problem for some people. But there are others talking about the same problems on these forums.

Until it's fixed, I would say that this isn't the most professional way to present to a client.
GmElliott wrote on 7/1/2004, 8:25 AM
I had a similar problem a while back with another machine with occasional blue screens going out to external monitor. I find out, after the fact, it was a known problem with the VIA chipset my mobo was using. My new machine I have no problems as such. I do sometimes notice the frame rate slow down briefly (enough to make the video framerate look ever so slightly off) but from what I've been explained this is normal sometimes. Whenever it doesn't look like it's playing 100% smooth I can simply pause wait a second then play again and it's fine. This happens on unprocessed footage sometimes- but like I explained it isn't very drastic...looks very similar as if the frame rate was running at 26fps instead of 30. Anyway if you are having blue frames and drastic frame rate issue to external monitor Spot was spot on (pun intended) with it being computer hardware related.

Other than that check your timeline to make sure the usual things aren't suspect (ie opacity in video track at 99% or something like that).