Video Capture Question - Dropping Frames

[Touchdown]

I have a brand new Dell Dimension 4550. It's a 2.53 GHZ with 640MB of memory. I have a GeForce2 GTS Video Card and am running Windows XP Professional. I am trying to capture some home MiniDV video through a PCI 1394 Firewire card. I have verified that my drives are running UltraDMA. My capture drive has nothing on it.

My IDE layout looks like this.

Current Setup:
Primary Master: Western Digital 60GB 7200 HD (Windows XP, Program Files)
Primary Slave: Western Digital 120GB 7200 HD (Video Capture, Storage)

Secondary Master: Memorex DVD+R/RW Burner (must be master per manual)
Secondary Slave: Samsung CD-ROM

I get between 30-40 dropped frames per 15 seconds of video when trying to capture through Adobe Premiere 6.0 I have all background programs disabled. Something is going on. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Pauli]

Hmmm, make sure your Anti-virus program is disabled. I have my capture disk on the secondary IDE channel, but I don't think that would make a huge difference. You have plenty of horsepower with that system -- I capture DV all day long with no dropped frames on my 2Ghz P4 with 512MB RAM and Audigy Firewire port. If it's not the Anti-Virus program that's causing this, I would suspect your PCI Firewire card is at fault. Not sure how you can test that, though...

 

[LethalWolfe]

I would hit Adobe's website and see if they have a a bulletin about your machine or something. It might be something as mundane as you are running a chipset version that's not compatible w/Premiere. Also, Premiere's known as not having the best capture ability out there.


Lethal

 

[Touchdown]

Thanks for the suggestions. I do have the Antivirus program disabled when running this as well as all other background programs.

I also upgraded to Premiere v6.5 last night and still had the same dropped frames. I also tried capturing with another program and had the same issue so I can elimiate it as being a Premiere issue.

I think I will try to switch the HD's on the channells.

 

[squidman]

15-30 dropped frames? I have 0-5 when capturing 40 minutes of analog! Friend, dell installs HELLA unnecessary crap on the PC. Probably all the garbage running in the background periodically accesing your harddrive (thats the main reason for dropped frames - harddrive).
The best solution - is NOT to uninstall these programs, but to do a clean install. if not - uninstall them, do a defrag of the main drive. Antivirus doesnt affect dropped frames, as long as it doesnt monitor the data getting on hd.
1. Format
2. Clean install
3. Enjoy

 

[squidman]

Aaaaand, while im at it:

Go to control panel - system - performance (i forgot the tab, im using me now). Set the manual page file to 550mb. Reboot. Then, go to "system restore" tab. Disable it (it aint gonna resotre nothing anyway), so it wouldnt monitor the incoming data.

 

[Pauli]

With that many dropped frames, I would first look at the Firewire card. There have been reports of certain Firewire chipsets not working too well. I'm sorry, I don't have any details at the moment, but I think I read that somewhere on the Pinnacle Studio 8 forums.

 

[Touchdown]

Thanks so much for the suggestions.

Squidman: The PC is a Dell but I actually did do a Format and Clean isntall of XP Prof as soon as I got it so none of the Dell crap is on it.

Pauli: I would also suspect the Firewire card, but I pulled that card out of a Dell PC I run at the office and we never have problems with it here so I don't think that is defective.

Just a thought, but my sound card is pretty old. Would a crappy sound card have any affect on dropped frames?

 

[rbV5]

I'd bet on the firewire card also, DV "capture" is less than 4MB/sec, all you're really doing is transfering the file from the camera to the PC, you should have no dropped frames even with a relatively slow system. Your IDE subsytem is more than plenty fast. Are you sure your settings are correct in your capture programs? using DV codecs and such? With Premiere 6.5, you should be able to even add transitions and effects and preview in real-time.

 

[toolfan]

Check to see if the Firewire card is sharing any IRQ's with other devices, some cards don't perform as well if that is the case. If it is and you have ACPI enabled, then you could try switching the card to a different slot and hope that Windows will assign it a different IRQ (or if you can manually specify an IRQ to use in your BIOS).

Along the same lines, check for PCI bus sharing within Device Manager (you will have to manually look at all your various devices' Properties pages to see what PCI bus they are on). If the Firewire card is on the same PCI bus as something else then put it in a different slot and hopefully it will be on a different bus.

Unplug any other Firewire or USB devices attached to the system in case they are being polled and causing communication issues.

Also, you have viewed the captured video and are definitely seeing the glitches? Some cards such as the Adaptec have been known to mis-report the number of dropped frames in some cases, so make sure you really are dropping frames and it is not just a reporting error.

HTH,
Brian