Cineform Capture with Premiere Pro CS3 Dropping Frames
 

Hi,

I've been trying out Cineform recently, and it seems like after around 45 min of capturing, it usually drops frames.

The system I have is Windows 7-64bit with an i7 930 CPU and the Aja Xena card (now know as Kona-PC). For the scratch disk I'm using a Raid 0 drive with 6 SATA WD RE2 500GB drives.

I'm capturing HD-SDI video (1920x1080 59.94i - 10bit 4:2:2) into Premiere Pro CS3 to the Cineform codec (with the large file size option selected).

All power saving options, screen savers, etc are turned off. CPU usage during this capture is usually around 15%.

Can anyone think of why I would be dropping frames -- Am I missing something?

Thanks, Alex

That is odd as it is clearly not CPU loaded. Weirdly try capturing to your system drive, or any single non-RAID drive. While RAIDs can be very fast, they often introduce latencies.

How much drive space is available on your RAID?

Many drives drop performance precipitously as you rise above half-full...particularly if it's fragmented from video editing.

Tim:

The RAID is nearly empty, it's been freshly formatted.

David:

I'll try that in a little while, but will my single WD RE2 SATA main drive have the throughput to support this?

Do you guys think that capturing with HD Link instead of Premiere Pro would be better?

Thanks,
Alex

1080i is only 12-20MB/s most drives can do that.

HDLink is a simplified version of the Premiere capture interface, so it shouldn't be different -- worth trying.

I've had the same problem with capturing HDV 720p footage from within PPro CS3. Lots of dropped frames, and sections where video was captured but no sound.

By sections, I mean in the middle of a 1 hour tape, I have a 20 minute section with no sound. If I just click the .avi files and play them outside of Premiere, they have sound.

When I capture with HDLink, I don't have this problem. I've done it both ways with the same tape. Now I only use HDLink.

I don't know if this is the cause, but this only started after I upgraded to the latest version of ProspectHD.