2 second blackouts when saving AVI file to camcorder

[James]

I can save a 7 minute movie using MovieMaker 2in DV-AVI
format to the hard drive and the resulting avi file is
perfect. If i try to send the movie to my Panasonic NV-
GX7B camcorder I find it randomly looses the movie for 2
to 3 seconds maybe 10 times or so during the 7 minute
film. I have tried the following:
Downloaded Intels hardware accelerator
Tried a different tape
Defragged my hard drive
Imported the complete avi file and tried to save that as
one clip to the camcorder.
Made sure that the firewire card has its own IRQ (18).
Set MovieMaker Process Priority to RealTime


PC is Intel Celeron 2.6Ghz, Windows XP home, Maxtor 7200
80Gb NTFS drive with loads of space with UDMA-5 enabled,
512Mb ram.

Camcorder manual states worryingly "Even if you use device
equipped with DV terminals (such as IEEE1394), you may not
be able to perform digital dubbing in some cases" Thanks
Panasonic, thats really helpful.

Anyone got any other ideas apart from getting another
drive for the video clips ?

 

[John Kelly]

Hi there,

That's an impressive list of things you have tried, in particular the
setting of Real Time.

Do you know what speed your hard drive can output data (That's a polite way
of asking is the hard drive fast enough).

I had glitches in the early days of using MM2, I solved almost all of my
problems by sticking an 80GB Mode 5 (I think) drive in and also by putting
it on a new EIDE card. Just in case you do not realise.....if your hard
drive is connected to your machine by the same cable that a CD-ROM (or DVD)
drive is, then you are going to get a bottle neck...if for any reason at
all the system has any conversation with the CD-ROM, then the data from
your hard drive will only be delivered at the same speed as the
conversation with the CD drive (hope that makes sense.

So, I have a 40GB on channel 1 of the motherboard EIDE, Both the CD and DVD
drives are on channel 2 of the motherboard EIDE, then I have a 40 GB drive
on channel 1 of the Mode 6 EIDE card and the 80GB on channel 2 of that
card. This way none of my hard drives are ever slowed down by the CD and
DVD drives and the 80GB for videos has a channel all to its self meaning
that data can flow to or from it at the systems best speed. You have to
remember that this configuration is only "useful" when more than one drive
needs to be accessed at the same time.

From what you say, the only things left to try are going to provide
marginal increases in speed (such as my solution above)

One other possibility has come to mind...your firewire card and cable.
Obviously if the card is minimum spec then any glitch else where will
probably be enough to allow the card to fail to "keep up". But what about
the cable? If its the one that came with the camera then you can probably
guess that it too will be the minimum they think they can get away with.
You might want to consider borrowing one from someone who has a known
"good" setup, or just go out and buy the best you can get. I have always
found Belkin to be a good make. And, just in case you do not
know...Electricity does not travel through wire...it travels on the outer
surface (the area of least resistance in an atomic sense), so many many
thin wires are much better than one single thick wire (it creates a greater
surface area for the electrons to flow along) and consequently the flow of
data will be better. Its a poor rule of thumb, bit if the cable you are
about to buy is noticeably thicker then it probably has more strands.

If all else fails, try shouting at it very loudly and slowly

 

[John Kelly]

Hi Again,

I'm not up to date any more but is your Celeron the type that does not have
the maths chip onboard....if so that would make a big difference. You might
also want to find out if it has Level 2 RAM on board and how big is
it....scrapping the barrel here

 

[James]

My CD writer _is_ on the same cable as the hard drive, so
I'll see what happens if I disable it or perhaps unplug it.

Maybe a bottleneck causes the odd frame to be dropped as
data is sent out to the camcorder which confuses its
timing calculations.

The firewire card I bought (Trust DV411P) seemed to work
fine when capturing video from the camcorder, so I have a
degree of confidence in the quality of the cable, also in
the ability of the hard drive to write data fast enough
and the processor to process the data quickly enough.
However the cable runs around the speakers on my desk and
my mobile phone was next to it so it is possible stray
signals are affecting things in the other direction.

Thanks for the feedback - gives me a few more ideas to try.

James

 

[John Kelly]

Hi There,

Yes the phone...you would not believe the trouble I went to a few days
back.....When watching TV in bed there was a very annoying buzz...Its a 5.1
system....anyway, I took the speakers apart and their power supply and
started pulling the Amp apart...could not find what it was at all....and
then the wife moved the phone on her bedside table !!!!! Just goes to
show....the simplest reason is usually the correct one

 

[PapaJohn]

Trys saving the movie to the hard drive as a DV-AVI file
and then copying the DV-AVI file from the hard drive to
the camcorder using the WinDV utility (link on the
Camcorders... General page of www.papajohn.org).

PapaJohn

 

[Guest]

Excellent, it worked first time with WinDV. Looks like
there's some weird interraction in my set up somewhere
with MovieMaker 2. Thanks for the advice.