Think I got it. I switched from DV to windows video and reduced the colors to 256. Gonna capture now and see if that works.

Frame drops in Premiere Pro
 

I'm having lots of frame drops when capturing footage from my Canon Optura 10 in Premiere Pro. This has never been an issue until the last couple of times I've captured. Now, I can hardly get 10 seconds of capture before frames start dropping like crazy.

My question is could this be blamed on dirty heads?

Bad tapes? (I've only used one brand, Sony HQ with the blue wrapper)

It seems as though after rendering the previews on the monitor in Premiere are choppy. I'm running a P4 @ 2.8Ghz, with 1.5gig of RAM so I feel like I have enough gas in the machine. Like I said, this has gotten progressively worse over time. When I first started editing video I never experienced this problem.

Any suggestions you might have to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Some of the likely culprits:
- a nearly full or very fragmented drive (check your drives)
- DMA got accidentally turned off for your capture drive (check and if needed, re-enable)
- 1394 cable/connection (try a different firewire cable)
- anti-virus or other background utility software (temporarily unplug your network connection for safety, turn 'em off, and try the capture again)

Switching brands of tapes is widely reported to cause problems, but if you've used the same tapes all along, shouldn't be a particular factor. I think dirty heads usually result in blocky noise rather than dropped frames, but I suppose if it is bad enough it could repeatedly break the continuity of the timecode in the signal. From what you're describing, though, it doesn't sound likely. More likely a HDD throughput issue since it gets worse as the capture continues.

If none of the above helps...we'll have to think harder!

I have two drives, one is nearly full, the other has 60gigs free. Could one drive being full effect performance?

I have not defragged the bigger drive lately, I'll try that.

I'm not sure what you are speaking of when you mention DMA. Explain?

I'm not opposed to buying another firewire if it helps. I'll try the defrag first and go from there. Thanks for your suggestions.

Anyone else have any ideas? Thank you.

Try "ace utilities: a free trial download from cnet.com. This along with the other suggestions given may help. I cleaned up my computer with it and everything now runs lightning fast. You can also easily view what programs that are running in the background and turn them off it necessary.

Regards,

Mark

Could one drive being full affect performance?

Yes, it could. Ideally, in a system with two hard drives (C and D) you'd want WinXP and PPro on your C Drive and you'd want to capture to your D Drive. Either of them being nearly full or in need of a defrag could slow the seek head on the hard drive enough to cause noticeable stutters, but the capture (D drive) would be especially susceptible. In fact, the physical limitation of head movements is why it is so strongly recommended to have a separate capture hard drive.

DMA is "Direct Memory Access" which is allows for much faster disk access than "PIO Mode." Go to your system's Device Manager, open the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" >> Primary IDE Channel >> (right click Properties) >> Advanced Settings tab. For your hard drives, if it says PIO, you'll need to change that to DMA, which MIGHT require you to reboot and select it in the BIOS. Otherwise, just select it in the dialog box. If your D Drive is on the Secondary IDE Channel, you'll need to repeat the process for it.

Anyway, if you do have a drive that's almost full, address that first...move some stuff off of it you don't need and run a defrag. Then let's see where you stand.

This should not be possible, because you are not doing an analog
capture. In analog you could instruct the capture board to use a
different sampling to get a different resolution.

However, with DV and firewire you are not sampling anything, you
are COPYING the digital information from either the CCD/CMOS
chips or the tape drive directly (with some added compression).

So if it supports this it will simply do a recompression which you
can do in the timeline yourself as well.

But really, why would you want to do this? Any computer can handle
DV signals without any problem. If there is too much footage (ie,
not enough harddisk space) you usually screen the footage
first and then only capture what you want to work with.

If you really want to do this do NOT forget to test the full workflow
(make sure you can easily replace the low quality version with the
high quality version later on!!!) before actually starting your
project!

Timeline lost forever?
 

I have tried the Premiere Pro, I think it must be the 1.0. After almost finishing the project, I accidentally pressed the X in upper right corner of the timeline window, and the timeline disappeared. I saved the project to save the work, but I cannot reopen it with the timeline. Is the timeline in this project lost and gone forever? I don’t find it. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Don't panic! Its just hiding.

If you goto the window menu, navigate to timeline. Then select the timeline. This should then hopefully bring it back.

Cheers,

Dosen't seem to capture correctly
 

I have an XL2 and I love it - When I capture to my PC thru firewire into Premier 6.0 and select widescreen 16:9, which is the way I recorded it on the camera, the resulting file, when played back seem slightly out of aspect - it's a little fat ?

Any info would be helpful ....

I had this idea recently as well. My reasons were because my computer being only 1.7ghz 512mb it did not render at a decent speed any sort of color correction or effects I was doing. But I really wanted to see how it would kinda look without the 5 minute render for each 30 second clip.

But at the same time I figured it would probably be more work to convert everything back over to the hiq version of the footage unless theres an efficient process for doing so.

Thanks. I had the feelings; the answer should be a simple one. The strange thing is that in this very project, the "timeline" option disappeared in the window menu as well. I've already done all the work once more… Thanks anyway.

Capture Question
 

I recently bought Premiere Pro 1.5 and am looking for a cheap way to transfer video from my VCR to the computer. I am going to be putting some of my old home movies onto DVD and I was wondering if anyone has used any of the Pinnacle devices or if they will even work with 1.5. I thought they looked like a cheap way to hook my VCR up if they worked. Any input would be appreciated. Any other devices I should look at?

Thanks!

Do you have a camcorder with analog input? That's the easiest way to do this. Use the S-video connection for better quality if you have it on your VCR (that's unlikely though).

What would you suggest as an alternative to all of matrox's effects - many of which are realtime and the mpeg accelerator. These are the only reasons I am personally looking at getting a matrox?