Can't capture
 

I'm trying to capture footage from Sony camcorder into FCP HD express, but every tape I try, the footage stops at about 15 secods and then FCP says "dropped frames were detected last capture attempt"
The software then shuts down and pauses the tape.

This happens with every tape, and all tapes are brand new tapes.

Is there a DMA mode on the hard drive that's disabled perhaps?

I know that happens sometimes on XP and older releases of Windows. The hard drive would feel super slow though, and your mouse pointer may get stuck any time you access the hard drive. That's a sure way to see if there's a problem.

You might want to run a drive speed test program to see if it's running super slow or not. And then track down the problem from there.

Eric

Don't think so, I'm on Mac, brand new drives. Don't utility test on them, never heard of drive speed test.

Now on issue of capturing.
Without fail, at 15 sec mark, the all captures abort and sign that dropped frams comes up. This is across many tapes, that are hardly worn out. So I thinking for first time, of unchecking the preference to abort if there are dropped frames. I don't like doing that, but what else can I do? The software seem to think that at 15-20 seconds in, of every tape I have there are dropped frames.

Has anyone else seen this?

Thinking of turning off ABORT if dropped frames
 

Without fail, at 15 sec mark, the all captures abort and sign that dropped frams comes up. This is across many tapes, that are hardly worn out. So I thinking for first time, of unchecking the preference to abort if there are dropped frames. I don't like doing that, but what else can I do? The software seem to think that at 15-20 seconds in, of every tape I have there are dropped frames.

Has anyone else seen this?

Based on what you've said, it sounds like your hard drive might be the issue instead of the tapes. What kind of disk are you capturing to... speed, interface, formatting, etc?

(Note: I have merged your two threads here. Please don't post the same thing in more than one forum, it's against DVinfo policy.)

New drives or not, Mac or not, it does not matter.

My point is, the computer may have trouble talking to the hard drive at a high enough speed to write the data before more gets backed up, causing a bottleneck and causing a dropout.

I replied to a similar thread on here a couple of months ago. Just search on Google for hard drive speed test mac and you'll find plenty of stuff. You basically need to see if your drive is able to achieve a decent speed and sustain it.

You need 3.5 megabytes/sec to capture HD/HDV video, which by today's hard drive standards is nothing. But it IS a problem if there's a DMA (Direct Memory Access) controller problem. If that's turned off for some reason, the CPU needs to help out with all the drive activity and that slows things down.

The fact that it's right at 15 seconds is odd. That seems too far in to be a drive writing problem. But maybe it's writing earlier, and then when it attempts to write again, it gets backed up.

Try this: Turn off the abort on dropped frames option and recapture. Then see how many dropped frames you get in say 60 seconds. If it's a drive writing issue, the # should go up exponentially each time it attempts to write to the drive.

Let me know how you make out.

Eric

you might want to listen to eric, instead of dismissing his suggestions. i had a similar issue once with FCP, and the problem was that my hard drive was too slow.

Thanks Meryem :)

I've come to realize more and more that Macs and OSX are not perfect and impervious to weird random troubles, the same as every other computer/OS EVER made. The sooner everyone else realizes this, the sooner everyone can get back to work. ;)

-Eric

Is it too obivious to mention the OS 4.9 issue? Did you recently upgrade to that? I know dropped frames are a prob with that. Just a suggestion

Would that be 10.4.9? I hope? ;)

Thanks guys!
Yes I did upgrade to 10.4.9
When you said,
" know dropped frames are a prob with that."
Did you mean to say that the problem is the OS "thinks" there are dropped frames when there are not, or that says there are dropped frames where in 10.4.8 it would not say that?

I hope it's that cause I don't want to think my brand new Seagate 750's are defective, but I will test in next day or two on my older Lacie D2's.

I just put a post on Mac Fix it about speed test. Google search did not bring up anything useful. anyone know how to test drives? I have several mainteneace apps, not sure if they have that test. I have tech tool pro, It does a drive test, but I don't "think' it gives you some number perforance, I just think it's probably a ok or not ok, right?

Try this one out, it's free :)
http://www.xbench.com/

This may also reveal other info about your system. I'm not sure if it will work with the latest update or not. There was an older post on another that linked to this, from an older OS update and said it previously hadn't worked with that, but was now fixed.

I thought OSX didn't break stuff when upgraded like Microsoft does? :)
*looks around, confused, then hugs PC*

I don't run 10.4.9 myself but I have read a lot of posts that, after upgrading to that OS, people were having probs with dropped frames they did not in the past. As in, they were getting dropped frames when they were not before.

Not sure if there is a fix for that, maybe troll around and find out more about it

Head over to aja's website under the download area for their speed test tool.

http://www.aja.com/html/support_kona3_swd.html

ok, tested all drives with those great softwares and they are all coming in at:
28/mb write and read 30mb or better.

what is DMA and how to look for that.

10.4.9, is this it. I mean this upgrade can't drop frames right? it can only misinterprate that no?