Help with Firewire Video Capturing

  • Thread starter Thread starter Matt McKnight
  • Start date Start date
M

Matt McKnight

Hey everyone,

I'm having a little trouble. I have a Digital Camcorder with a firewire
connection. Whenever I capture video, the video will start to skip every
once in a while, and this skipping is visible in the final video. My hard
drive only has a 2MB buffer, so I figured that was the problem.

I found some possible solutions, but can anyone tell me if it will work or
not?

#1) Get a hard drive with a larger buffer, like the 8MB Western Digital
Caviar drives

#2) Find some way to copy the video into RAM, and then to the hard drive.

Can anyone help me out??

Thanks!
 
Matt McKnight said:
Hey everyone,

I'm having a little trouble. I have a Digital Camcorder with a firewire
connection. Whenever I capture video, the video will start to skip every
once in a while, and this skipping is visible in the final video. My hard
drive only has a 2MB buffer, so I figured that was the problem.

I found some possible solutions, but can anyone tell me if it will work or
not?

#1) Get a hard drive with a larger buffer, like the 8MB Western Digital
Caviar drives

#2) Find some way to copy the video into RAM, and then to the hard drive.

Can anyone help me out??

Thanks!
Click to expand...


You may want to include more info such as the speed of your hard drive!!!
If its an
oldie drive with a 5400 rpm speed, therin lies your problem!!!

Anything else on your system that may slow it down????

What software/hardware setup to import the camcorder video????

Starz_Kid...
 
Matt said:
Hey everyone,

I'm having a little trouble. I have a Digital Camcorder with a firewire
connection. Whenever I capture video, the video will start to skip every
once in a while, and this skipping is visible in the final video. My hard
drive only has a 2MB buffer, so I figured that was the problem.

I found some possible solutions, but can anyone tell me if it will work or
not?

#1) Get a hard drive with a larger buffer, like the 8MB Western Digital
Caviar drives
Click to expand...

First try the OS tweaks at www.videoguys.com , see the tech pages links.
Many times there is some crap like norton antivirus etc running in the
background causing this or too many services in win2K/XP running etc. 8meg
drives help but almost any modern drive should be able to capture video
without dropping frames. You do have DMA enabled on the drive? What sort of
thoughput does it have? Are you using an 80wire IDE cable?
#2) Find some way to copy the video into RAM, and then to the hard drive.
Click to expand...


Nope, if tweaking the OS/software doesn't fix it, buy a second ata100+
7200RPM 8meg drive and put it on a different chanel from the system drive.
 
I'm running a P4 2.5Ghz with 256MB of RDRAM. a 7200, 2MB 40GB WD Hard Drive.
Also, I'm using the firewire port on my Audigy sound card, would that make
any difference???
 
Matt said:
I'm running a P4 2.5Ghz with 256MB of RDRAM. a 7200, 2MB 40GB WD Hard
Drive. Also, I'm using the firewire port on my Audigy sound card, would
that make any difference???
Click to expand...


The hardware is fine, you have an issue with the OS setup or a capture
software issue.

Wait, are you running XP? If so that isn't enough ram!
 
Matt said:
I'm running a P4 2.5Ghz with 256MB of RDRAM. a 7200, 2MB 40GB WD Hard
Drive. Also, I'm using the firewire port on my Audigy sound card, would
that make any difference???
Click to expand...


Try amcap, a simple capture program by MS that will test to see if it's your
capture software..

http://noeld.com/dlvconf.htm
 
Matt said:
:( Not enough RAM?? RDRAM is ssssooo expensive!! How much should I
:have??
Click to expand...

Hate to say it but with XP you NEED at least 384-512 for video editing.
With win98SE you can get by with 256.. I've built systems with 256 and
found that the above seems to be what these need. You might squeek by using
a VERY light program like amcap for capture or scenalyzer
http://www.scenalyzer.com/ and then after saving the file, edit them from
your harddrive?

Like I said in another post you need to tweak the OS and check all the
settings for the drives etc before you are sure it's a hardware issue.
 
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