XL1 audio problem with a PC
 

I am using an XL1A camera editing with a AMD XP 1700 processor, Epox 8KHA+ motherboard, 256Mb DDR memory and Maxtor ATA100 drives. (A 40GB and a 60GB). I am using a SIIG 3 port PCI firewire card and cable. I am using Window XP with every latest patch available. I have no problems capturing the video, and even found out how to get the stereo 2 channel captured digitally. Once in, the editing goes fine, I am primarily using MSP 6.0.0.2, but have tried Vegas Video 3.0, and Premiere 6.0 and they all have pros and cons. Anyway, the problem comes in when I export back to the camera. At first, I got A LOT of audio skips, and occationally a video jitter when I sent it back to the camera. Then I changed to the 60GB second hard drive formatted in NTFS and defraged after every render. The video is now perfect, but I still get an audio skip almost exactly every 5 minutes of video. The skip may last for about 1/2 of a second, but it is very annoying, and I would like to get rid of them. I found I got the best results when I packed the audio every 30 frames of video in the DV type 1 AVI. I tried goofing with quite a few settings when I would render a final video, but can't seem to get it perfect. Could there be some issue with the camera or firewire card. It did say it was OHCI compliant, with a transfer rate up to 4Mb per second. Or is this a common problem with PC editing?

Hi,

A couple of things to try;

Ensure you have no other applications running in the background when you edit. Things like screen savers and virus checkers can cause problems like yours.

Your HD's should be delivering at least 20Mb/s, check that this is the case. My 40Gig WD drives deliver at 25 - 30Mb/s. I am a 98SE user and am totally unfamiliar with XP. Does XP automatically activate DMA on the drives. If not activate DMA.

Make sure that your drive with XP and your data drive are on different IDE channels.

Regards
Andrew

Well, I tested my hard drive, and the 60GB I am using does a read/write test anywhere from 33-37 Mb per second. I did make sure that they are on separate IDE channels, that is what prompted me to get the second hard drive. Yes, XP automatically enables DMA. I even made sure that I am using the 80 pin cable that is recommended for drives > ATA66. Thanks for the help though.