Partly OT - Video Capture - Dropped Frames

[AlanH]

I'm having a nightmare experience with what should be a straightforward audio-for-video job.

My collaborator has given me a set of DV tapes whose audio I have to replace. With SAW that's dead easy if I can do a clean capture of the DV from tape in the first place. But even when recording to a newly-formatted HD partition, I'm getting dropped frames with various capture software (including SAW Video Viewer).

What confuses me is the fact that the 'dropped frames' counter on each of the capture apps always reports '0 dropped frames', yet I have lost them in the AVI file.

So here's the question: where does the 'dropped frames' counter get its information from? Is it something that comes from the underlying DirectShow functionality? If so, is it only telling part of the story?

Any light shed on this would help me for the future.

Thanks in advance,

[Bob L]

Read thru the firewire fix threads here... it sounds like you are falling prey to the Microsoft firewire fiasco.

Bob L

[AlanH]

OK thanks, Bob,

Have now installed the 2 hotfixes - will see if that does the trick.

Cheers,

[Carl G.]

OK thanks, Bob,

Have now installed the 2 hotfixes - will see if that does the trick.

Cheers,

Alan... I'm in the midst of the FW threads....
I see ONE hotfix and a fix we have to do on our own.

Are there two hotfixes from MS??

[AudioAstronomer]

Alan... I'm in the midst of the FW threads....
I see ONE hotfix and a fix we have to do on our own.

Are there two hotfixes from MS??

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/KB885222

and

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/904412

There maybe others too

[DominicPerry]

904412 is a new one on me. And it doesn't tell you anywhere what it actually does. Maybe it corrects something fundamentally stupid they don't want to admit to - something more stupid than setting FW to 100Mb/s as a default.

Dominic

[Carl G.]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/KB885222

and

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/904412

There maybe others too

OK... I applied both patches just in case and set SidSpeed to #2 (for FW 400 ext. Drive).
Here are my HDspeed measurements (in kBytes/Sec)
FW 400 Ext. Maxtor Drive WRITE: 28,283
FW 400 Ext. Maxtor Drive READ: 34,492

By comparison:
Internal SATA Drive WRITE: 55,341
Internal SATA Drive READ: 53,585

Clearly SATA has a big advantage.
Would you consider the speeds I obtained from my FW 400 Ext Maxtor drive to be normal (for properly set SidSpeed for FW400)????

[AudioAstronomer]

35mb/s for a mid-range FW drive sounds about right.

[Dave Labrecque]

35mb/s for a mid-range FW drive sounds about right.

I think you mean MegaByte, Robert. Yes? (The little b can be confusing to some. Some, like me.)

[AudioAstronomer]

I think you mean MegaByte, Robert. Yes? (The little b can be confusing to some. Some, like me.)

35MB/s or 280Mb/s

I think speaking in bits is silly. It's like saying everything in cents.

"Ok sir, the total for your groceries is nine thousand, six hundred and fifty three cents."


Unless we're talking about quantities less than one byte, or are on another platform where the bitcount is different... why don't we all default to byte?