Please Help! - Frame Drops - Is it system or camcorder?

JavaNut wrote on 6/19/2002, 11:46 AM
I am struggling with frame drops, video that freezes and audio that gets chopped up during capture with VV3. My configuration is as follows:

Panasonic PV-DV710 Camcorder
Windows XP
Dell Precision 530
Dual 2GHz Pentium 4 Xeon processors
1GB Ram
Adaptec 1200a Raid controller (Level 0)
7200RPM IDE Drives
Radeon 8500 - 128MB video card
Microsoft DV
OHCI Firewire built into Motherboard

I have tried capture without preview, with and without audio, and I can never seem to get a clean capture. If I use XP's move maker software, I get better results than with VV3, but with movie maker, I can't tell if I am dropping frames.

I have tried to test my disk throughput, but I can't find any good utilities to do it the way I need (sequential writes). As far as I can tell, my sustained read rate is 54MB/s, but that doesn't tell me what I need.

Has anyone had any experience with capturing with a Panasonic PV-DV710?
Is my PV-DV710 firewire output not up to standards?
Is the internal OHCI firewire port able to keep up?
How can I determine where the breakdown is?
Are there any performance testing tools to help me figure this out.

P.S. While my capture is going, my CPU never gets above 20%, so I am fairly certain it is not processor based.

Comments

JavaNut wrote on 6/19/2002, 11:49 AM
One last question...

I noticed while capturing in VV3 that the "Current Location" timecode (at the bottom right) does not seem to be smooth. It runs for a few seconds, pauses, then runs, then pauses. Is this normal?
SonyEPM wrote on 6/19/2002, 12:10 PM
The mobo 1394 could be a problem- but numerous other things can caused dropped frames. Search this forum and www.creativecow.net for "dropped frames" and you'll find many threads dealing with this issue.
Zulqar-Cheema wrote on 6/19/2002, 12:11 PM
I was going to ask that question and yes it does it on mine as well.

I am using a laptop and seem to be getting results now, 34mins in and 8 frames dropped. Turn everything you are not using off, got RUN and type MSCONFIG and check under STARTUP anything that is not required is not loaded. Also make sure you do not use the same hard drive that XP is on to put your footage on, try that and come back.

ZC
JavaNut wrote on 6/19/2002, 12:24 PM
zcheema,

Thanks for the input, but therein lies the problem....I have a RAID controller. This means it takes all hard drives and combines them into one so that I can stripe across them and get double the throughput.

Now, the drives are on separate logical partitions, but they are physically on the same raided set. I would have to get another raid card and another set of drives to separate them physically.
JavaNut wrote on 6/19/2002, 12:27 PM
SonicEPM,

Thanks for the suggestion, however, most of the threads I have read speak about defrags and using separate drives. Due to RAID, I am somewhat bound by a single logical drive over multiple physical drives. What should I do in this case?

I happen to have an old MotoDV firewire card that I could manage to dig up (though unsure about drivers for XP). Do you have any knowledge about MotoDV? Good, bad, ugly?
Maverick wrote on 6/19/2002, 1:10 PM
I've asked this somewhere before and never received an answer. Being new to W2K I've found I don't have a MSCONFIG. I know I can quite apps on the right -hand side of the task bar but how do I quit another apps that may be running in the background that aren't shown? I know I can use the Task Manager but does that really list all apps?

There doesn't seem to be any refernce to all the other things like SYStray, etc plus those apps that sit there waiting to remind you of something you don't want to be riminded about - how do we W2K users kill them, even temporarily if need be?

Thanks
SonyEPM wrote on 6/19/2002, 2:19 PM
I am not sure that Moto DV cards are compliant- haven't tried on in about 4 years and that was on a Mac so who knows.

Pyro or SIIG 1394 PCI cards can be found all over, for less that $75, and those work great. I won't guarantee this will solve the dropped frame issues, but at least you'll have a 1394 that does definitely work- all troubleshooting from there can be done inside Windows.
vernman wrote on 6/19/2002, 2:19 PM
The question is in addition, what other sf software are you using ? I'm encountering the same situation with my system (vv3 build 107). I installed sf 6.0 & 6.0a then encountered a problem with batch converter. I uninstalled all sf software and found the win2k registry had artifacts not removed during the uninstall. I finally cleaned the reg and got BC to work after reinstalling the sf software. Now I have a capture problem in VV3. Audio is out of sync ith video. build 127/128 isn't available, and the dll switch suggested provided no joy. My system. Pinnacle capture card, dual PIII 800 processors, a gig of ram, raid drives and raedon agp video. With an XL1 for the DV source. NTSC @ 29.97 fps. I don't think I have a system problem since I can capture without sync problems using other DV capture utilities.
sounds like something might have happened with the new sf 6 release that cascaded to vv3.
JavaNut wrote on 6/19/2002, 10:26 PM

I do have ACID 3.0 loaded. Should I remove it? What about the other video applications that I may have loaded at one time (during my eval stages)?

This is why I ask, is there something use which can point out where the bottleneck is? i.e. Too many interrupts during video capture, disk latency, OS multitasking interruptions etc.
JavaNut wrote on 6/19/2002, 10:48 PM

Ok, I can check on a different firewire card.

The question still remains, however, on the RAID configuration. Do you think that by having Windoze XP on the same RAIDed drive presents a problem? Is there anyone else out there that is running RAID where Windows is installed and it is working fine?

Thanks again for all your help.
BillyBoy wrote on 6/20/2002, 8:57 AM
A RAID that includes the partition that your OS is on if that's what you're capturing to is a no-no.

I have a very fast system and if I try to capture to the drive the OS is on I almost always introduce the drop frame problem. If I capture to a SEPERATE drive then I never have dropped frames.

A seperate drive in this context means a seperate physical drive, not just a seperate drive letter on the primary drive.