Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/25/2003, 6:14 PM
Jesse,

Are you capturing DV via firewire, or analog via some capture card or USB? If analog, what capture device at what resolution? This will determine the sustained data transfer rate you need to maintain to capture the frames.

The next question is what type of computer are you using? How fast is the processor, the hard drives etc. What operating system are you using? Are you using a dedicated hard disk for capture? Did you defragment your video capture disk? Are you sure you’re not running any other programs during capture? How about all those pesky little leaches that show up in msconfig? Something as simple as a USB device that polls to see if you’ve inserted a device can cause dropped frames on marginal systems. (I had a photo program do this to me because it kept polling to see if I put a SmartMedia card in my USB card reader so it could pop up and ask if I wanted to view the pictures. Every time it polled I dropped frames on WinMe) Try a program like EndItAll to terminate these.

A little more information about your system and what steps you’ve already done would help us know where to start. A Fast hard drive dedicated to capture and a well tuned operating system are what you need. There are sites I could send you to for tweaking tips for your OS if I knew what it was.

~jr
imagixnation17 wrote on 8/26/2003, 2:18 PM
im going thru firewire...im using a sony viao computer, 256 ram, 40 and 20 gig hard drives, Windows xp, the computer is totally made for video editing its just the program was great but then all of sudden started doing this
JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/26/2003, 3:13 PM
It sounds like it might be a background task that wasn’t there before. Did you install any new software lately? Do you have anti-virus running in the background? I would get a program like EndItAll2 and kill everything that is non essential and see if that clears it up.

Like I said, you’d be surprised what programs install on your computer without you knowing it that stay resident as a task. If it worked once and doesn’t now, you have to determine what changed about your system lately.

~jr
Steve Grisetti wrote on 8/26/2003, 3:22 PM
Most likely you've accumulated junk files.

Download Spybot Search & Destroy and get rid of all those pesky spyware applets.

And run RegCleaner to get rid of accumulated junk in your registry.

This is especially true if you have AOL Instant Messenger or if you trade files on Kazaa.

And I'm assuming you turn off your background tasks, especially your virus detector, when capturing or outputting DV.

Also, if you're networked to another or are connected to the Internet via DSL or a cable modem, disable the hardware by right-clicking on it and choosing 'disable' in the Device Manager. Don't worry, it won't erase your settings and you can turn it all back on when you're done.

Finally, check your Scheduled Tasks in your Control Panel and make sure they're all disabled. Same with Windows Automatic Update, PC Health Files, System Restore and any other automatic tasks.

Any of these things could be problems but, since you didn't have a problem before, it's probably just accumulated junk.

Oh, and be sure to update to DirectX 9.0b.