Need help troubleshooting

wufred wrote on 10/24/2006, 2:43 AM
Just got back from vacation and captured 11 hours of video into my hard drive. I can visualize all my friends happy faces when they review the video. But suddenly the bottom fell out ...
After editing the first hour using V6, the rendering failed with "the reason for error could not be determined". I made sure there was enough temp file storage, and also rendered a few clips in Vegas 5 and had the same error.
Then I found that the clips had deteriorated. If I played them now on the preview window, the frame number at the bottom of the window would run for a while and then the video would stop and the frame number would go "765...." with the dots increasing. Then it would pick up and run again and would stop for quite a few times with the same dots routine.
I uninstalled V6 and re-downloaded from Sony, but the same problem came up. If anything , the clips seems to be deteriorating even more.
I prevewed one of my old captured clips from another hard drive. It plays, but I could almost see that the frame counter would sometimes blink a "0" as if it was hesitating.
I copied my DV tape onto an old Digital 8 and try to recapture it, now the capturing suddely became very slow, capturing 40% of 15 minute tape in more than half an hour, and I can see that the preview is very slow as well.
I am running Windows XP-SP2 on a P4 with a ATI all-in-wonder 900 video card and capturing over firewire from a Sony DCR-HC85 camcorder.
Can someone please help with some suggestions where I should look to troubleshoot? Everything had been working the same before and I haven't changed any settings.
Help, I can visualize all my friend's sad faces....
Thanks
Fred

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/24/2006, 3:33 AM
How do the clips look in other media players?
bevross wrote on 10/24/2006, 6:29 AM
Since 11 hours of video would take up a very large amount of hard drive space, I'm betting your problem is lack of space on your drives. I ran into something similar -- seemingly enough room on the drive but difficulty getting things to work; a new 350 gig internal drive solved the problem. I try to be very conservative in what I ask my computers to do (though not politically conservative!), keeping the drive, at max, half full is one of these things. In your case, I'd try moving stuff off the drive (to an external drive or something), bring in just 1 hour of video & see if that works. Defragging the drive after you move stuff off might help, too.
Ayath The Loafer wrote on 10/24/2006, 8:04 AM
It would be a great help if you posted some information on your system.

In explorer
Right click - Properties on each drive and relate the numbers on disk space and remaining space.

Ayath
DavidMcKnight wrote on 10/24/2006, 8:24 AM
Another thing to check is the cpu usage during these times of inactivity. Is there something chewing up cpu cycles that you may not be aware of? Check you system tray in the lower right corner and exit / close / stop items you don't absolutely have to have.
wufred wrote on 10/24/2006, 11:02 PM
Thank you all for so many suggestions.
I should have plenty of room. on the drives My clips and the "render to" are on the same drive. It is a new 300Gb drive that I started just for this project. 153Gb used, 125Gb left. My C drive still has 53Gb left.
Trying on another player was a great suggestion. I ran a couple of clips on the Windows Media player. All of them had a hesitation in the beginning. Subjectively, I think maybe about 5sec into the clip, but rest of the clips all ran smoothly. Not sure what that means.
I also used Virus scan and scanned all my drives, and downloaded Spybot and cleaned all my cookies etc.
Tonight, I will try to capture again and try to catch which applications is hogging the CPU time and also defrag the drive before I go to bed.
Will let you know what happeded.
Thank you all again.
TeetimeNC wrote on 10/25/2006, 4:27 AM
Wufred, is it possible your new HD is in PIO mode rather than DMA? Another possibility is that you didn't use the 80 conductor cable required by DMA drives? Or that the cable is bad?

Here's a good thread that discusses this.

Scroll down to the response by JohnMeyer.

Jerry

Edit: Also be sure indexing is turned OFF for the new drive.
wufred wrote on 10/26/2006, 3:08 AM
Hi Jerry,
Thank you so much for the thread, I think you may have hit my nail on the head.
My computer was labouring and was running slower and slower the more I tried to do things on it. Defragging the 150Gb on the drive took almost a day and defragging my C drive took overnight. Finally when I rebooted after defrag, it stopped somewhere in the WIndows flash screen.
I unplugged my new drive, and everything seemed to have gotten back to the usual speed. After replugging the new drive, so far, I kept off touching it but started to read about DMA's, and my speed had been very normal.
My question is, quoting John Meyer : " Follow my directions in the previous post for getting to the Control Panel, and then to the device manager, and then to the IDE Primary Controller. Once there, change the setting from PIO to DMA, and then reboot. Then, go back to the Control Panel and make sure the DMA setting has "stuck." If it has, your problems will be over, I guarantee it."
I went to my IDE primary controller and indeed my device 1 was saying "DMA if possible" in the transfer line, and "not applicable" in the current Xfer line. My three other drives are giving me "Ultra DMA mode 2, 4 and 5". For fear of sounding stupid, I am still not able to force this drive into DMA mode. This window did not let me, the BIOS does not have the option, and Seagates utilities did not offer that option either. Where can I do it?
I have a Asus P5GDC mother board with a P4. The board has a 40 cable ribbon for my optical drives and two 80 pin IDE for my 4 drives.
Thanks,
Fred
TeetimeNC wrote on 10/26/2006, 3:53 AM
Fred, sounds frustrating. I'm not sure why it would get progressively worse if it was in PIO mode. But the fact that device manager is showing the current xfer line as "not applicable" for the new drive makes me think it isn't in DMA mode. Go into your bios and see if the drive is properly identified there. There should be a key sequence when you do a cold boot that takes you to the bios screen. I believe it is possible to incorrectly identify a drive type there and that can cause device manager to not detect DMA. Good luck.

Jerry
rmack350 wrote on 10/26/2006, 10:50 AM
You may also have jumpers misconfigured. These days, Cable Select works just fine. You could set both the drive to CS.

If you want to use Master/Slave jumper settings then if it is at the end of the ribbon set it to master and if in the middle set it to slave.

Rob Mack
wufred wrote on 11/7/2006, 2:21 AM
Hi, just want to get back to you about my problem. I still could not locate the source of it and I finally broke down and bought a new 300Gb SATA that was on sale. Installed it and everything worked fine. I think it must have something to do with my other 300Gb. Although, now, I put the old drive back on so that I can retrieve some of the files and my computer is working OK now. Wierd.
I'll get back to try to reproduce my problem after I've finished my project.
Thanks for all your advice.