Print to Tape problems solved

Craftygolfer wrote on 6/3/2002, 10:17 PM
This forum has been extremely helpful for this newbie. I wanted to share the process that brought final victory. I had at first attempt printed to tape a 4 minute video, then, with the final version at 22 minutes, was unable to print to tape. I believe the problem rested in 3 things: I had installed a photosmart printer (OHCI card conflict) for which I disconnected & uninstalled; I disabled my Gateway "go back" (there are many other programs like "Go Back" that are constantly copying each move made by your computer which causes a conflict); I changed the template from default to NTSC DV since I was printing to my Digital Video recorder (suggested by a support person via email).
My computer:
Gateway AMD Athlon 1000 MHz
128 mb ram
32mb NVIDIA GeForce2 MX Graphics Accelerator
40 GB ATA Hard Drive
40 GB Maxtor Hard Drive as dedicated disk
SoundBllaster Live
WIN ME (yuk but works)
I also uninstalled my video Blaster Web Cam folders & my Ad-Aware ( somewhat like Norton anti-virus but it protects against nosey companies.)
Finally, I disconnected my wireless internet connection.
Hope this helps someone. I've truly enjoyed this software and can't wait to finalize the wedding video for my nephew.

Comments

Grazie wrote on 6/4/2002, 1:10 AM
Good of you to post your solution. I'll keep all this in mind too! Sometimes less IS more.....

Regards

Grazie
Hammer wrote on 6/4/2002, 7:39 AM
I'm glad you solved your problem but it sounds to like an extreme solution. Goes along somewhat with my "frames dropped" thread, but this software seems overly sensitive to other programs/processes. I'm assuming you needed the printer and webcam? So what now, you install and de-install each time you want to use these?
jrstueve wrote on 6/4/2002, 11:52 AM
It seems that the PrintToTape process is extremely sensitive to real-time anomolies...

Not the software itself.

The rendering process can be run in the background while foreground procese continue, because there is no need to meet the requirements for streaming bits concurrently.

A hard drive is a Random Access device, any set of bits can be placed anywhere on the platter (or any platter for that matter) and be retrieved at roughly the same access time.

A tape isn't a Random Access device, but instead runs under the assumption that data will be laid out in the order it will be retrieved, and that is also time sensitive. (actually a music CD runs under that same assumption, because CDs were originally mastered like a vinyl record as one long contiguous stream of music)

So while printing to tape, you'd want to make sure that only the print to tape process was running. (I suppose you could fiddle with the priorities in the Task Manager of Windows, and set the SF process to 'RealTime'... but that might have unforseen circumstances... like seemingly locking up the computer during the PrintToTape process...)

HTH
Craftygolfer wrote on 6/4/2002, 3:19 PM
WHat is SF in Task Manager?
I must note that I probably disabled & uninstalled more than what was necessary. The main thing was the printer's program that included an OCHI card because it is a memory card printer (I read about someone else's printer conflicts in either this forum or on the computervideo.com site.) I certainly don't need the printer while "printing to tape" so I'm happy.
jrstueve wrote on 6/4/2002, 9:57 PM
not sure if you can access individual processes in ME...

In NT (2000 not sure about XP) you can use the task manager to look at each process in the system, and change the priority... a real time priority would take precedence over a normal process and grab more resources by default...
johnmeyer wrote on 8/9/2002, 3:27 PM
I know I'm not supposed to reply to old posts, but I thought it was important to make sure that everyone knows the real culprit. The problem is that the Photosmart printer with card reader insists on loading a background process called "HPHA1MON". When this process is loading you will drop frames when capturing or printing to tape. If you end it, everything works fine.

Jon