Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 4/6/2005, 8:08 PM
Yep. Could be your firewire connection. I got a higher end ASUS motherboard that comes with a built-in firewire support. I forget which, either printing to tape or capture caused blue screen and dropped frames like crazy. Other direction worked fine. I dropped in a external firewire card, worked fine ever since. The firewire interface MUST be 100% compliant. The tough part is trying to find out if your firewire is or not. Its often isn't something that's on the box or manual in the case of a motherboard.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/6/2005, 8:12 PM
Omar,
This is usually indicative of a few things.
1. OHCI compliant firewire card. Off-brand cards often say they're compliant, but they're not.
2. VIA chipset on your motherboard. Check to see if there is a bios upgrade. For the KT 133, 233, and 333 chipsets, there is definitely a VIA bios update available.
3. Promise RAID controller interfering with stream. Disable and try again.
4. Sound card resources messing with the stream. Modify your IRQ for the Firewire/1394 card so it's on a different resource.
There are other issues as well. John Meyer contributed a HUGE section on Firewire issues to the Vegas FAQ, www.vasst.com/training/vegasfaq.htm and that'll provide additional answers.
jimingo wrote on 4/6/2005, 8:16 PM
the exact thing happens to me when printing to tape. About once every 15 minutes or so my screen goes to blue for about a second or two - I actually gave up. Now when I need to make a VHS I just render my projects to mpeg-2 and burn a DVD, then record the VHS from the DVD (as long as the videos are under 2 hrs, you usually can't tell the difference in quality). I'm not sure why this problem happens. I talked to tech support and they couldn't solve my problem. They said that it was probably my mouse (my mouse is connected via usb) and that is known to cause some problems, but I unpluged my mouse and the problem still occured. I am still using vegas 4 so hopefully this goes away when I upgrade to vegas 6.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/7/2005, 12:25 AM
Check to see if you have a CPU fan that kicks in when it gets hot. These can use system resources, and it might be your system can't manage it. It could also be caused by a NIC, a mouse, or other system resource. Could be bios related, as that controls what shares what and when on boot
Grazie wrote on 4/7/2005, 1:40 AM
Omar? What system is it? Laptop or other? My Dell Inspiron laptop - apart from the fan issue, which csuased it too! - uses power managment software. This kicks in at different times too. This in turn "trips" PTT. If it is a laptop I may have a solution.

Grazie
Xcelerate wrote on 4/7/2005, 7:23 AM
I had the same problem before, but I found out it had nothing to do with the firewire or firewire card. If your hard drive is set to PIO mode (most are by default), then you will drop frames because the data transfer rate from a device to your hard drive is way too slow. So, in Device Manager, select Properties for whichever drive, and set the mode to UDMA (5 if available). If you do not have an option to set the mode (like I didn't), then you will probably need to download Intel Application Accelerator, which lets you configure the mode. However, uninstall it after you change the mode because my computer kept crashing with the program installed (I have no clue).

I'm not sure if this is your problem or not but it sure helped me.