I have turned all previews off. I am capturing from a Canon ZR25 MC DV Camera. I have windows xp and my pc is a P4 2.5 (overclocked to 2.8), 512 ram. Gigabyte motherboard using the built in Firewire port. Can you capture through a different program like Windows Movie maker then just import the captured AVIs with no loss of quality?

Thanks

Sure you can.

Can you turn off the overclocking?

Yes I can, do you think it is affecting it??

Turned down my bus speed back to 133 to turn off overclocking and I already have 9 dropped frames in the first minute of capturing! :-(

Then it ain't that.

I can't look now, but there are some options setting for capture you can tweak. I useta get a few dropped frames...but I don't anymore. But that was my dumb fault, I would be running other stuff while capturing..

Glenn,

Do you have a separate drive for captures or are you using one drive for everything (i.e. OS + apps + capture)? If you are then I recommend you thoroughly defrag your hard disk and try capturing again. Ideally, you should have a separate drive for captures

Cheers,

Scott

Yes I am capturing to a Data Drive, it is a seperate physical drive. :-(

Have you tried defragging that drive?

Is your data drive on the same IDE channel as you main drive or is it a master on your second IDE channel? Ideally, it should be the latter.

Scott

It has been defragged and it is not on the same IDE channel as my master. I have no idea what else to check. I wouldnt care so much if it were a few dropped frames, but I am getting upwards of 300 for 1 full 60 min DV capture!

glenn71x, well now that we established the obvious like defragging your drive which I think you said you did in your first post :) Look, maybe the first thing is to remove vegas capture from the equation as you suggested. Windows movie maker2 (download upgrade if you have not from windows update) arguably should work if before all others if we assume Microsoft got it right. Also, there are several other free cap utils out there.

If they also drop frames then you have something strange going on in your system. I run xp on an old 1.4 TBird and have NEVER had a dropped frame unless something was running in the background. Pull up the task manager while capturing, select processes and sort by CPU. Nothing else should be hogging much cpu cycles. If something is note what it is and either kill it in Taskmanager or turn it off. Btw, right before you start caping, is your HD light on? You may want to elect to change virtual memory setting min and max to the same setting like 1024 or something. That will set virtual memory up as a contiguous area on your HD.

Your problem does not make much sense on a good fast machine like it sounds like you have, especially with the separate 7200 rpm drives. Something has just got to be hoggin cycles. Oh, maybe make sure you turn off Anti Virus stuff too. I probably just stated the obvious again, but I hope this might help in some way. Good luck.

You also should look at the driver for the 1394 port and make sure XP didn't assign
a network driver to it. If it did, open up your network icon in the control panel
and delete the network tie-in to the 1394 card.

JJK

Well i just tried using Scenalyzer and I am STILL getting the dropped frames! I notice in my network connections there is a seperate connection for a 1394 network adapter. I uninstalled it and deleted it but when you reboot of course XP puts it back. I dont know if this is the problem though. It is a seperate entry in network adapters. But i Have the 1394 adapter seperately in 1394 adapters. It is built on the motherboard. Do you think this is causing the problem. Does a seperate capture card give better results?

Hi Glenn,

If you want to remove the 1394 network adapter from the equation then simply right-click on it in device manager and select 'disable'. While you're there it might be worth looking to see if any other device are sharing the IRQ with your firewire port. You can do this by selecting "View"->"Resources by type" on the device manager menu and then look in the IRQ section.

Scott

It is on irq 16 along with my Geforce 4 Video card, and the USB Host controller. Should this be changed somehow?

I have a vague recollection about possible problems with USB sharing with firewire - If you can, try moving the USB to a different IRQ

Scott

How can you move the USB and 1394 to different IRQs if it is built into the motherboard?

And so it goes..... on the questions keep coming and the qustions keep responding...

I am going down this raod myself and yes Grrrrrrr. it's more black magice then science.

Keep em flowing...

The BIOS setup may let you do this. If not, then I can only suggest that Glenn temporarily disables the USB controller that shares the IRQ with the firewire port (right-click it in Device Mananger and select Disable) and see if that solves the dropped frames problem. If it does then I recommend Glenn gets a separate PCI firewire card. If it doesn't then ... I'm all out of ideas 8o)

Cheers,

Scott

Hi zcheema,

Sorry to hear you're having similar problems ... just wondering ... are you using a 'builtin' firewire port or do you have a separate firewire PCI card?

Scott

Ok I just found my old Texas Instruments PCI Firewire board I had laying around in my spare parts closet :) Installed it and I am still getting dropped frames. Not AS Many but still at least 2 a minute. What exactly is an exceptable rate of dropped frames anyway? I am losing my mind! I have a PC that can basically do anything I want with the power it has except capture simple video! GRRRRRR!

You still have to get that network tie-in to the 1394 out of there. It has no business
being there and will cause you problems. The IRQ thing is another pandora's box.
Ultimately you want your video card by itself, but some faster machines seem to
work OK even with all the IRQ's stacked up on one of them. If you have 6 slots on
your board, anything in slot 1 or 6 will be in partnership with the video card in the
AGP slot. You can change things around a bit with the new APCI system but not much.
Your motherboard CMOS has a section to assign slots to the IRQ's but most of the
time this will not work because of the APCI. You can shut off the APCI in the motherboard but it won't work unless you reload XP and use the Standard system.
This is really a bunch of screwing around and if your not a "GEEK" I wouldn't mess with
it. Priority #1---get that network driver off the 1394 port, it serves no purpose except for
Bill Gates to monitor your system when you use the activation code. (I think)
Then try your system. If it still doesn't work then try to isolate the 1394 port
by itself and also from the video card if possible. Good luck you will need it.

JJK

I have disabled both of the network tie ins to the two 1394 cards now. Still no go. I can not change the Irqs in XP, they are grayed out. Wouldnt it figure the new 1394 card I just put in is also sharing an IRQ with a different USB Host COntroller! This is unbelievable. This should be simple I would think. I could use Windows Movie Maker to capture but it does not even give Dropped Frame stats so I have no idea if it is doing any better than vegas. Not sure what else to try...