Hello there,
It sounds as though an event is being triggered that is robbing your save to
camera operation of processor time or worse. Theoretically a data stream is a
data stream etc and so it should not happen....you need to discover what it is
that occurs with such regularity as you describe. It may be for example that
you have one of those memory programs that attempts to optimize your memories
performance. I have not yet come across one that can do that in such a way as
every programs temporary data is not lost...the kind of temporary data stored
in a buffer waiting to be sent somewhere, like your camera. Prior to finally
going out and buying a 1.5GB upgrade of DDR RAM for each machine, I used memory
optimizers on my 512MB of RAM. It works well with most other types of program
but it managed to crash Movie Maker several times and MovieDV used to lock up
on me.
There are loads of other things that can cause problems like this. If you check
on my website you will find some remarks about speed that others have found
useful. Basically what you have to do is remove any process that will grab too
much of your CPU's time, sounds simple but not always.
Whilst defragmenting your hard drive is always a useful task prior to video
capture it serves no useful purpose at all when compiling the final video. It
is not a time critical function but is access time dependent, so if the hard
drive was fragmented to an almost impossible degree all that would happen is
that Movie Maker simply sits there waiting for the next command to process a
bit more data. A hard drive would have to yet again be fragmented to an all but
impossible degree for the seek time of the heads to adversely affect the
straight transfer of data to the buffer waiting to be sent to the camera at a
fixed rate of approx 13GB per hour which is equal to 291KB a second, if your
hard drive is set at DMA Mode 5 (Most common speed nowadays) it is capable of
transferring up to 100MB a second .....so even if there was some moderately
heavy fragmentation it would still not be all that great an issue and it
certainly would not be an issue such that it occurred at regular intervals.
You will find a useful dialog on my website with some pointers on how to make
sure your hard drive(s) are working as expected in the FAQ section