Problems capturing and rendering

habed wrote on 1/17/2005, 11:24 AM
I recently had to re format my HDD and install everything back. Also got a 250GB IOMEGA External HDD via firewire to be able to keep all my music and videos and not slow down the performance of my VAIO Laptop.

In the meantime, I upgraded to XP Service pack 2.

The first problem I found was trying to capture from my Mini DV camera, the capture program kept droping an amazing quantity of frames (almost 40%). I stopped and used Adobe Premiere LE, same thing. Then I used another one and same deal. I finally could import my videos using windows movie maker without a glitch.

Now, I edited my video and added some stills and FX and all in MOvie Studio 3.0, but when I save the movie it takes triple or more time to make a movie than it used to. For example, yesterday it took it almost 5 hours to render a 5 minutes movie (3 minutes video and 2 minutes stills plus music) it is way much faster rendering stills than video. And it used to take an hour at the most before re formating and upgrading.

Plus, when editing, I noticed that the image in the preview window jumps and sometime locks or freezes when transitioning from one clip to another.

Nothing like this happened before, is it Service pack 2? What's wrong what can I do? I'm just starting a video bussiness and can't keep up with this problem, just imagine trying to render a 1hr video, it'd take me 2 days or so.

Thank's in advance and excuse my english, I'm from Mexico

Comments

GerryLeacock wrote on 1/17/2005, 1:26 PM
I tried capturing once to an external HD and found that it was a bottleneck for the information being sent to it. The HD couldn't receive the information over the external connection as fast as it was being sent, so frames were dropped. Try saving directly to your INTERNAL HD and see if you are still dropping frames.
ScottW wrote on 1/17/2005, 3:22 PM
This is a known issue with SP2 - Microsoft has a patch. Here's one location for the patch, and I;m sure it's also on microsofts web site:
http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/winxp-1394.html
habed wrote on 1/17/2005, 8:23 PM
All these problems show up with all the video, stills and music in the internal HDD. I found that having all or some of them in the external HDD was worst. So Firewire is not an issue (but I got the patch and installed it anyway, thank you!!)

Any other idea???
IanG wrote on 1/18/2005, 12:42 AM
Is DMA still enabled on your drives?

Ian G.
ScottW wrote on 1/18/2005, 5:16 AM
The other possibility that comes to mind is that you have a virus. If your PC was connected to the internet during your re-install there's a good chance you got infected. I believe that on average, it takes 15 minutes now for an unprotected PC connected to the internet to become infected with one of the many viri floating around.

If you bring up task manager with no other programs running, and look at your performance graph, does your CPU show that you are using more than 1 or 2% of the CPU?
habed wrote on 1/20/2005, 12:28 PM
should I disable DMA? If so, why and how???
IanG wrote on 1/21/2005, 3:00 AM
DMA should be enabled - having it disabled slows things down a lot! You can check and change your options in control panel / system / hardware / device manager / IDE ATA/ATAPI Contollers and look at the advanced settings for each port.

Ian G.
habed wrote on 1/23/2005, 8:51 AM
DMA is enabled, my laptop is virus free. I guess the problem came with the XPSP2, so, if that's the problem I guess I'll have to do what we all do, wait for Microsoft to release a patch to fix what they released to fix something else.