Dropping frames during DV video capture

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G

Guest

Hello,
I am having a video capture problem. I am dropping
frames like crazy.

I have downloaded the latest DirectX. I have a 60 GB
hard drive and a 120 GB external hard drive. My computer
is two months old and so should be equiped with all the
latest technology. I have tried three different DV
Capturing software programs. I am using fire wire
cables. I have also disabled my antivurus program
running in the back and I'm not using any other software
simultaneously.

Any solutions? Appreciate you knowedgable people giving
a hand.

Thansk!!
 
Well I am by no means a guru at this, but I do have some questions and
suggestions that might get you in the right direction. When I played around
with doing this type of thing a while ago one of the biggest differences was
in the hardware used. Firewire is good, but if you are trying to capture
720x480 at 30fps and your target drive is a single 5400 rpm drive you are
probably going to drop frames like mad. Just as a guess, unless you put the
drives in yourself, I would wager you have 5400 rpm drives in your system
and they just don't have the ability to store the data fast enough. When I
was doing this I was using 2 7200rpm, 2MB cache, 40GB drives that were
stripped on a Promise IDE RAID controller. With that setup I was able to
capture at 720x480 30fps and only drop about 1 frame every 5 minuets or so.
When capturing to a similar drive by itself I had to cut my resolution down
to 320x240 before I stopped dropping frames.

So things to try:
Can you capture at lower resolutions without dropping frames? Like 320x240
or even 160x120.
Get good specs on your drive. Can it handle the ammount of data you are
going to push to it? Remember in your case burst data transfer rates will do
you no good.
IF you are wanting to capture at high resolutions you might consider
upgrading your target drive to either high rpm SCSI (10k+) or RAID or both.

Hope that helps.

Joshua Smith
DirectInput Test Lab
Microsoft
 
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