A year ago, I got a MiniDV camera. Since then, I’ve tinkered with it and been able to successfully get DV quality movies off of it onto my computer, but the last time I really did that was in August.
The other day, I tried to pull video off of it onto the computer using the firewire port, but the video I pulled off (about 15 minutes at DV-quality setting) was jumpy and sounded out of sync. On the camera, the video is fine, and when I was ripping it, the computer looked like it was about to die of exhaustion. I needed about an hour total of video ripped to go onto a DVD, but the highest quality I was able to rip it at was WMV at 512 kbps, 320x240 resolution. Any higher settings resulted in jumpy video.
This is the same computer I used to get the other videos off last year, and they worked fine. Here are my system specs: Intel P4 CPU @ 2.0 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 15 GB free HD space, Windows XP. I’m using Windows Movie Maker (with preview off during capture) to extract the video from my DV cam, so my options are limited to DV-AVI or WMV format.
Anyone know what the problem might be? I’ve closed every other running process I can think of, and the DV video always becomes jumpy shortly after recording begins. I defragged my hard drive, didn’t help.
Not every program is going to nicely tell you that it’s running. Go to task manager and click the processes tab to see everything. You’d be suprised what things are hogging performance.
Done that, ended everything not vital. Still having the problem… I tried another program, and frames are dropping left and right. I haven’t changed my system at all since I was able to record video fine earlier in the year, so I’m pretty puzzled.
Make sure that the firewire connection is secure. Is there some other device you can use to check that the firewire port is working? What does device manager say about this port? You might also try another cable between your camera and computer. Also make sure that your hard drive is DMA-enabled. 15GB should be enough, but how much free space did you have back in August. Free up more space and see if that helps. But I’m suspecting the firewire connection.
In August, I had even less free space. The Firewire connection is pretty secure, I believe, because if I connect the camera and just playback the video without trying to record it, it plays fine on my screen.
I’m starting to suspect a processor issue… lately, Winamp has started acting up when other windows open, if there’s hard disk activity, etc… things it never did before. Is there perhaps some performance setting I may have inadvertantly change?
Playback and capturing put different stresses on your computer. Assuming that your firewire setup is working right, what’s happening is that your hard drive is not working fast enough to capture all the frames. So frames are being dropped with the resulting jerkiness in the captured video. Maybe your hard drive is starting to go bad. Can you run a diagnostic on it? Are you sure it is DMA enabled? If you can, try capturing to another drive. To eliminate the possibility that the problem has something to do with the OS, you can try restoring your computer to a pre-August date when thing were working right.
Thanks for the advice… I’m not sure how to run a diagnostic on the hard drive? I checked the DMA; it’s enabled. I don’t have another drive to try, just the one hard drive… and I don’t have a pre-August restore point. :-/
My own narrowing it down left me with the possibility that something might be running that isn’t showing up as running, given the sporadic Winamp trouble as well. Thoughts?
I assume you already scanned your system with spybot and the recent microsoft antispyware and they showed nothing. In cases like this, the odds of you successfully identifying and neutralizing the cause of the problem are slim so if I were you, i’d proceed to the next step.
You’re not going to like this but I recommend you try with a freshly installed windows. You don’t need to wipe out your current windows installation though. If you have an available partition (or can create one) you can dual boot. If the problem shows up on the fresh windows install, then you can rule out all kinds of software issues. If that doesn’t solve it, you can get rid of it by formatting the partition you installed it.
You might be able to with the winXP cd but I usually use A dedicated Partition manager program to do it. They’re much simpler to use and they give you a much better overview of what you’re actually doing (so less chances of screwing up)
I would recommend Paragon Partition Manager. There is a trial version available at download.com . Partition Magic is another valid option but you’d have to purchase it.
Now let’s assume you have one 100 Gb HD with 15 Gb of free space.
First you would resize your current partition from 100 Gb to anywhere between 85 to 95 Gb. Let’s say you resize it to 90 Gb. This will leave you with unused disk space of 10 Gb. Next you would create a partition using those 10 Gb. Voila, now you have a C: drive with 5 Gb of free space left and a brand new D: drive with 10 Gb of free space.
You would then install winXP on the D: drive and then install whatever drivers you need for video, audio and your video camera. Test it.
Once you’re done, reboot in your original Windows and launch the partition program, wipe out the 10 Gb partition you have created, resize your 90Gb partition back to 100 Gb and you’re back where you started.
Note: i’m using round figures (100 Gb and so on) to make it simpler but in practice, the numbers will differ (as you probably already know)
Have you always been ripping to WMV? I wonder whether the conversion from DV is putting additional load on your system.
When I transfer from camera, I keep the raw files as DV-format/codec AVIs so that they doesn’t need to be transcoded. (If DV-encoded video can be encapsulated in a WMV without transcoding to some Microsoft-standard encoding, please ignore this–I know little of WMVs.)
