I have a 1.4 AMD and 1/2 gig of DDR ram with a Geforce 2 ti chipset and free space of 28 gigs on a maxtor 7200rpm drive. I defragged drive and closed all programs running in background.....still frame dropping...hmmm any help would be great!

Baker

There are a number of things you need to check -- and you can find detailed answers by taking some time to search this forum. Make sure your drives have DMA enabled, this is usually the cause. Otherwise, check that you don't have any IRQ conflicts with your firewire card, and you are capturing to a drive other than the one your OS is installed on. It's also helpful to have 7200rpm drives, though 5400 is possible. Beyond that, check that Jupiter is not aligned with Pluto.

Good luck--
Luxo

Are you capturing to the same HD as the Windows and VV3? That might have something to do with it as well.

I tried with both hard drives one running windows and on the extra drive not running windows on it. I will continue to try to work this bug...thank you all for your insight.

Baker

I have a P3 866MHz and 512MB Ram and can capture with out frame dropping. However...

What you might want to check, is the Maxtor 7200 rpm drive. The main drive that came with my system was a Maxtor 20GB 7200rpm drive and I never could capture reliably without dropping frames. It wasn't until I bought a Western Digital 30GB 7200rpm replacement drive that everything cleared up. I don't think I've dropped a frame since. I've owned 5 Western Digital Drives in my computer life, all performing flawlessly. I don't know if it is the cach on the Maxtor drives or what. I also had a friend with a prolem Maxtor drive. Who knows.

Currently I'm using a WD 80GB drive as my main drive and that previous WD 30GB drive as a secondary drive.

Yeah Ty for your response, I enabled DMA on my drive and all is PERFECT!!! Not a single frame lost!

I only use Maxtor....maybe I'll try WD one day only when they are hella cheap for a storage drive...lol

You don't state how your machine is running otherwise. I'll share a problem I just ran into this morning, who knows, maybe it will help you.

I've been running VV3.0 without a single glitch since I first loaded it onto my 900 mhz/win2k machine.

Early this morning, that stupid Windows Critical Update thingy popped up in my face while I was online, so I said to myself, what the hey (or is it hay), and went ahead and downloaded the 'critical update.'

Fortunately, I took note of the items contained in the update, one of which was an updated whiz bang driver for my Logitech USB mouse.

I wasn't working in VV at the time, so I didn't notice right away, but, set up a capture later that did not turn out well . . . many dropped frames, choppy playback.

On my next attempt at capture, Vidcap noticed me that it could not open my DV capture device.

I could turn my cam off and back on and see the little pop-up confirming that it had been detected by my system, but vidcap could not make use of the device.

I also run Pinnacle's Studio 7 on the same system. I tried capturing there. But, again, there were many dropped frames. Eventually, S7 also refused to recognize my camcorder.

I also noticed that the action of my mouse pointer (I use a logitech USB marble) was unpredictably jerky, and that it seemed some gremlin was literally interupting the action of my entire machine, as though some pendulum was swinging through the electric current, interupting all processes momentarily on a regular basis.

Having experienced something similar in the past, and knowing that the only recent change to my machine was the critical update, I immediately suspected the mouse driver.

Switching from the marble to a conventional PS2 mouse corrected the system interruptions, but neither video editing program would initiate my camcorder over the firewire.

I tried downloading Logitech's latest driver, but installing it did not improve the action or glitchy performance of my marble pointer.

Trying to remove the logitech device didn't improve things either.

The only fix that worked for me was to insert my Win2k program disk, embark upon a fresh install of Win2k, then, at the SECOND opportunity the install routine gave me to opt for a repair rather than full (independent) install, I opted for the repair. Win2k overwrote my existing system files, and the performance of my machine was set right again. (For what it's worth, Win2k's install program offers an earlier option to repair rather than install afresh (this offer includes to options "R" and, I think "C" for repair from console . . . I tried that console approach, but it did not correct my problem . . . bypassing this initial "repair" option and opting for yet a second opportunity later in the "full install" routine must provide a more robust replacement of system files, I guess)

Of course, I had to download anew the DirectX8.x (I opted for 8.1) before VV3.0 would install.

I made certain that both VV and Studio 7 were working properly again before I tried messing with the USB Marble pointer. Even then, I opted to stick with the mouse driver Win2k selected for my conventional mouse rather than mess with the Critical Update driver or the latest Logitech driver (I just powered down, unplugged the PS2 mouse, powered up, plugged in the USB and it worked fine).

I'm not sure why the updated driver (and later the latest Logitech driver) played such havoc with my machine, but you might want to take a look at the mouse driver you're using as one possible cause of your inconsistent capture results.

What really clued me in was that previously captured files (that I knew were had been ok) also played back in herky jerky fashion.

By the way, my system includes a couple of 7200 RPM Maxtors and three 80-gig 5400 RPM external firewire drives. Neither VV nor Studio 7 shows any preference, and both programs capture and print to tape just fine from any of these drives.

Hope this helps someone.

Caruso

I got it figured out...I had to change out my cables...I didnt have IDE cables...I replaced the old ones with IDE cables and now everything is fine.