capturing problems

[cheech]

windows will usually stop capturing and always at least drop a few seconds
worth of frames when i try to capture from my digital video camera via
firewire. i have had best luck with capturing to my boot drive (fat32), and
have even gotten as much as three minutes captured once there. most
captures get about 90 seconds or less before dropping several seconds of
frames or halting capturing completely. when i cap to my data drive (ntfs),
the results are even worse. i've defrag'd both drives several times, and
have even disabled most tsr programs and unneeded services.

this is is very perplexing as i've got the hardware (listed below) to handle
this, especially considering that i've done this before on this machine with
pretty good success. the only difference is i added the data drive since
then. it's a slave to the boot drive. if i make it a secondary master,
could this possibly fix the problem? i'm running out of options it seems.

hardware:
dell dimension 4400
1.7ghz P4
1gb ram
20gb boot drive (fat32) with 50% free
200gb data drive (ntfs) with 80% free
ati radeon 7000 w/ 64mb video memory agp cart (at 1280x1024 res and 32bit
color as always has been)
17" lcd screen
adaptec 1394 card

 

[John Kelly]

Hello there,

You need a file storage system that is the fastest possible and you are
using one of the slowest. You need to convert your system to using the NTFS
file system. In addition you need to ensure that the target drive for video
capture is both defragmented and has clusters set at 64Kb. In addition,
using the Windows XP defragment program is a No No. This program defragments
files very well, but it leaves chucks of hard drive space in between the
files...this means that any capture made to that drive will immediately
create a fragmented file and because of the jumps that the heads make whilst
recording you introduce a backlog in the data flow which can cause frames to
be lost.

Your system specs look ok. To a large extent it does not matter where
your graphics card is when considering suitability for "Capturing Video" I
turn mine off (the preview mode)

If you have installed the 200GB drive your self the following MUST exist

1) The drive is not sharing a cable with any device that is slower than the
drive (cd-rom etc)
2) Because of the drive size it is probably able to support DMA Mode 6 and
should be set-up to achieve that speed
3) If DMA Mode 6 you will need a second EIDE card...most motherboards of 12
months or more in age will not be able to support it
4) If it does not support DMA mode 6 then it MUST be set to DMA Mode 5
5) Your C drive is possibly set at PIO mode.....if so it too must be
switched to DMA mode and set to at least mode 4.
6) You must ensure that the Transfer block size for each drive is set to
32bit or 64 if you have a 64bit motherboard.

If you have any problems please do contact me.

Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-kellys.org
Use of someone else's messages is called plagerism...others name it for what
it is...Plain and Simple THEFT!!!

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

If you haven't tried a capture with the WinDV utility, try it to see what
you get... there's a link on the Digital Camcorder > Intro page of
www.papajohn.org

PapaJohn

 

[Randy [MSFT]]

Also be sure that you are *not* using drive compression on the FAT32
partition and that you aren't using compressed folders for your video files
on the NTFS partition.

 

[cheech]

thanks! i'll try that!

 

[John Kelly]

Hi there Randy,

That's a very good point indeed. I never use that compression option,
there is not a lot of point with drives being so cheap. But, I will add it
to my list of things to NOT do.

--
Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-kellys.org
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