Video Capture Problem in 4.0 b-c-d

LT7 wrote on 9/15/2003, 12:59 PM

Hey Guys,

I have a fairly serious problem with video capture. It's been ongoing for months and it would be nice, if maybe someone on here, can help. I tried SF Phone Support many times and constant email back and forth with SF too, however, no solution was found... When I try to capture video off my Sony TRV 900 via Firewire, I crash and burn.

My PC is as follows: Enermax 450 Watt PSU, Pentium 4 @2.53 GHz w/ 533 FSB, Asus MoBo P4T533-C, NVDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4600 GPU, Creative 'Audigy' 5.1 Sound Card, 3 Western Digital Caviar Drives - 1 is 120G JB Series for system, 2 are 80G JB Series in RAID 0 for video editing/rendering. I use a Promise FastTrack TX 2000 RAID Controller. I have one gig of Kingston Rambus Ram at 1066MHz. I recently installed the NEWEST BIOS for my MoBo and Promise Card as well. I run Windows XP Pro SPK1, with ALL latest updates applied. I run the newest Direct X 9b. My audio and video cards have the newest drivers too. I use a Sony TRV 900 MiniDV Camcorder with a Pyro IEEE-1394 Card to capture with. I boot with most all background services disabled and do NOT run other programs to capture. In fact, I many times open SF VidCap 4.0 -with VV 4.0 closed down. I recently reformatted my drive and installed Windows XP Pro fresh. I currently RUN VV & VC 4.0d Build 205.

My PROBLEM is, every time I try to capture video, SF VC 4.0 will just lock up, or start acting weird showing my timecode moving by minutes a second, rather then frames per second. At any rate, the final result is the same. I LOSE the clip I was trying to capture and then have to restart! This goes on over and over all day, reboot after reboot. I even tried moving my Firewire card to NEW PCI Slots to NO avail. This is KILLING me. I cannot get crap done because I cannot get video onto my HD's, from my Sony. YES, all my settings have been gone over 100 times and I do NOT have other software on my H-D that can interfere like Pinnacle. However, when I USED to run Adobe Premiere 6.5, I was ABLE to capture just fine with it, on this very same PC. Lastly, this Sony TRV 900 Camcorder works FINE on another PC my friend edits on, and even a bone stock Mac (Power Mac) G4 running Final Cut Pro. Why does Premiere 6.5 and Final Cut Pro work fine for capture? Anyone?

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Comments

RichMacDonald wrote on 9/19/2003, 2:12 PM

I also have a TRV900 and Pyro card. I have a 350Mhz PII and 5400rpm maxtor. I use Win2K. I can just barely capture without dropouts and I cannot print to tape without dropouts. I had no problems with VV3 vidcap. With VV4 vidcap, I found I did sometimes crash vidcap. But no funny stuff like you're talking about. It would just die and Win2K would tell me it was generating an error log. Then I could restart and continue without problems. Although I did sometimes crash immediately if I tried to open the previous vidcap dbase file, so I would have to create a new dbase file before continuing. I would suggest you create a new dbase file, but you would have already been doing so with your repeated installs. At least do so after you crash during capture and see if it improves the next attempt.

I remember that I crashed during capture and once or twice I actually crashed *before* capture, i.e., during idle.

I'm not sure if I missed it in the detailed replies, but you could go back to the VV3 vidcap. I know this was an option for some users who had problems when VV4 was first released. Or you could try something like scenalyzer, although I'm not familiar with the codec details, i.e., is that satisfactory for you?

Finally, I never use preview in vidcap. I turn off both video and audio preview. If I turn it on, the poor old 350Mhz cannot keep up. Perhaps you can try this and see if it changes anything.