Hello

I am capturing via Firewire and saving as WM9 with the setting "High quality PAL, variable bit rate". My processor is close to 100% all the time and when I play the final movie it has dropped frames. If I lower the bit rate to under 1 Mbps it plays smoothly. But I want highest quality since I am doing my film for DVD.

Is an AMD Athlon 2200+ with 512Mb ram too slow for encoding HQ 720x526? I have tried both saving in DV and WM format. What am I doing wrong?

It sounds like you have all the frames, but the playback is dropping what it
needs to in order to keep up with the real-time flow of data. If that's the
case and the issue is simply with playback on the computer, then you can
render your movie to DV-AVI and produce your DVD. It should play fine on
your DVD player.

You can encode on a less powerful computer than what is needed to play it
back smoothly.

PapaJohn

"MovieMan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:620ECE34-39EB-4FD8-9212-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hello,
>
> I am capturing via Firewire and saving as WM9 with the setting "High
quality PAL, variable bit rate". My processor is close to 100% all the time
and when I play the final movie it has dropped frames. If I lower the bit
rate to under 1 Mbps it plays smoothly. But I want highest quality since I
am doing my film for DVD.
>
> Is an AMD Athlon 2200+ with 512Mb ram too slow for encoding HQ 720x526? I
have tried both saving in DV and WM format. What am I doing wrong?

I think it goes wrong during capture and saving, not on playback. The first two minutes of my stream plays fine but then it stops dropping frames. If I watch the Task Manager the CPU usage is 100% the first two minutes and then drops to 30% for the rest of my capture. Its like he is giving up saying "I cannot hold this up anylonger" and start dropping.

I am no expert but realtime encoding from the camera must be much more tough for the CPU than playback?

It's the hard drive condition - like free space, defrag, buffer settings,
speed.... that's most important for capture.

PapaJohn.

"MovieMan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:85994A71-E5E5-45DC-88FE-(E-Mail Removed)...
> I think it goes wrong during capture and saving, not on playback. The
first two minutes of my stream plays fine but then it stops dropping frames.
If I watch the Task Manager the CPU usage is 100% the first two minutes and
then drops to 30% for the rest of my capture. Its like he is giving up
saying "I cannot hold this up anylonger" and start dropping.
>
> I am no expert but realtime encoding from the camera must be much more
tough for the CPU than playback?
>