Capture problem, dropped frames
 

Howdy all,
I am just starting out in the Vegas universe and am having a few problems with dropping plenty of frames during capture. I suspect it is a settings problem, but need help.
In 20 secs of footage, 9 dropped frames with a definite click on the audio as well. tried with different cameras, tapes etc same problem with all.
Vegas 5, Footage shot as PAL, capturing with firewire, to laptop, 2.2 Gig CPU, 448RAM, Win XP, I defraged the hard drive immediately before starting capture. Someone suggested it might be spindle speed of my hard drive, but I can't see why that might be a problem during capture.......a video card perhaps?
Any ideas. Am dying to use the program, but until I get the capture sorted I can't go any further.

First thing to check: Make sure DMA is active on your hard drives.

Go to Device Manager and make sure DMA is enabled on your hard drive. Shut down all background programs including virus checker. You can do that by CTRL-ALT-DEL to Task Manager and checking the applications tab. IF anything is running, stop it.

The speed of your hard drive could be a problem. It needs to be at least 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm is better. Also, the hard drive needs to have plenty of available space. You would be better off with a second hard drive for capture...like a USB or Firewire external drive.

Yeah, that fixed it. 6 frames lost in 3 minutes of capture now. Is that acceptable?
Boy, am I green!

External hard drive is at the top of my "to get list".

My goal is ZERO per HOUR.

Hey Colin,

The best thing to do is to get an external Firewire drive to use for all of your footage.. That will be the answer to you dropping frames.. no doubt..

Mike m.

Colin,

I always capture 60 minutes without any dropped frames. When I upgraded from V4 to V5, I experienced about 9 dropped frames druing a 60 minute capture. I didn't think my disk needed it, but I cleaned up all temp files, cookies, etc, and defragmented my hard drive (internal dedicated to Vegas projects). Since then I haven't had any frames dropped during a 60 minute capture.

Thanks for the advice, a external hard drive is my top priority right now. Most are USB 2.0 now a days, since it's faster than firewire. Is there any reason to get one with firewire connection over USB 2.0?

Firewire is actually slightly faster than USB2 (in terms of real world performance).

Performance also depends on what controller you are using. With firewire all the controllers are pretty much the same. With USB2, this is NOT the case. USB2 will likely be slower on:
old Macs
built-in controllers on your motherboard that are from the off-brands.

2- I believe lots of people are editing fine with both kind of drives, and I don't know how they compare.

Before you purchase an USB external drive, you might want to check out this site: http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm.

There's still a fair amount of confusion as to how manufacturers are labeling their USB equipment. The USB 2 spec includes three speeds and they are Hi-Speed, Full-Speed and Low-Speed.

High-Speed goes up to 480Mbits/second. Full-Speed goes to only 12Mbits/second.

The web site goes into much more detail.

250MB drive for $130 - Awesome deal from compusa
 

They have an internet special right now and sell the 250 GIG 8mb cache, 7200RPM maxtor for $129 (no rebates). I bought this drive for $180 and am very happy.

Combine this drive with a good external firewire or USB 2.0 enclosure and you have 250 Gig video capture/editing space.

Here's the link:

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...ct_code=302225

or go to compusa.com and search for 302225

Note that this might be a temporary sale - the regular price is $179 but at the time of this post the price is $129. Also,
I am not associated with compusa and the link does not include any referral codes - just showing you a great deal.

Good luck.

-- Andre

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : Firewire is actually slightly faster than USB2 (in terms of real world performance). -->>>

Firewire also uses a different data transfer protocol which is better for video capture than USB.

Dennis Vogel

Arghhh! OK, am home for three days and wanted to check some footage from production. But I'm getting constant dropped frames where I only rarely did with Vegas 4. Reading this thread, I can honestly say I've tried everything you guys suggest, or I should say, I already have these settings in place and have already tried these checks, eg. DMA is active, I've tried an external firewire drive (7200, of course), no other apps are running when checking cntrl>alt>delete (though a lot of "processes" come up), and my processor is a 3 GHz with 1 1/2 gig of RAM.

But here's what I'm curious about...

Out of frustration I downloaded, from Tucows, a little program to try, called "Security Task Manager." It shows a boatload of things and I'm wondering if they're "running in the background" even though cntrl>alt>delete doesn't show any of them as active. And if they are indeed running, and "quarantining" them might help for getting things captured w/o dropped frames, what are the minimum programs I need running that it lists, other than, for example, Windows Expolorer?

(sigh)

I'm totally frustrated. Any feedback would be great.
Marcia

I can't answer directly what minimum list of processes you need running, but I narrowed mine down by reviewing guidance at:

blackviper.com

Scroll down to the "Popular Content" section and select "Windows XP Service Configurations". This is detailed content and is not a simple checklist of things to turn on or off. But its a very thorough treatment.

Also available in a less thorough but easier to read treatment is:

http://www.videoguys.com/WinXP.html

The WinXP Tips & Tweaks page.

Sorry for only pointing you places instead of giving the magic button you're looking for. I'm not enough of a geek to know without research.

re: blackviper
The only services worth tweaking IMO are indexing service (may hurt performance) and messenger service (should leave this off, it lets other people spam you if you aren't firewalled).

Processes:
Most of the processes under your user name you can kill via Crtl Alt Del. Don't kill Vegas of course.

Now if you have adware, spyware, or viruses on your computer, they may be programmed so that they're harder to kill. Some of them run as system services and show up in windows task manager under the user name "SYSTEM".

A safe thing to do is to google the name of each process. If you have adware/spyware, search for removal instructions on sites like pchell.com.

3- How full is your hard drive?