While capturing my digital8 tapes using Premiere pro I have sometimes
'dropped frames'. Not many. 1 or 2 every 10-20 minutes. Capturing the
same tape again, I have those dropped frame in different locations and
different number of them.

Having 1.8 MHz processor, 640 MB of RAM and a 160 GB HD I am little bit
worried about this and surprised to see it. However, on the other side,
when I edit, author, burn and watch my DVD I see no errors in my movie.
Everything goes smoothly and I cannot tell where the dropped frames
were.

I would like to ask those more experienced and more knowledgable in
video theory. Should I worry? Should I upgrade my computer and try to
eliminate those dropped frames at any cost? What happened with dropped
frames during editing and authoring? Are they automatically repaired so
I cannot see any errors?

Any general advice?

"peter" wrote ...
Generally inicates one or more bottlenecks in your computer.

I have captured hundreds of hours of DV (same data stream
as D8) with a comptuer running 1/6 that speed (300MHz).
So it doesn't seem likely that the processor speed is the issue.
And 640MB of RAM seems sufficient (I was running with
256 and 512 MB).

However, I would never capture video to the same drive as
the operating system is running from (whether the C: drive
or another logical partition). Windows just has too much
stuff going on in the background to allow reliable continuous
access to that disc.

Are you using a separate physical disc drive for the video files?

That seems normal and consistent with the experience of
most of us. There are some people who are obsessed
about dropped frames. But my theory is that if you can't
tell anything is missing in the final product, what's the
big deal?

1. If it ain't "broke" don't attempt to "fix" it.
Depends on your particular definition of "broke".

2. I would certainly dedicate a separate hard drive to video
files, EXCLUSIVELY. And keep it de-fragged, particularly
for capture. Hard drives are ridiculously cheap, and the
defragging utility built into Windows is adequate.

are you using your system drive or a partition of your system drive as your
video drive?

is DMA on ?
"peter" <pet.tra@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message
news:1121201835.940586.327080@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com...

I haven't had that problem in a while, but usually I found that dropped
frames occur when my hard drive gets too fragmented. Try defragmenting
your hard drive. I now have a 3.4 Ghz Pentium IV with 2GB RAM and a
10,000 RPM hard drive and dropped frames are pretty much a thing of the
past.

Ven Hawkins

I have two hard drives.
C: has the operating system
D: has video files only, but I installed Adobe Premiere and Encore on
it.

Do you think that reinstalling video processing software to C: would
help?

1. yes, worry. a pc that fast should never drop frames. you can get
<500Mhz notebooks capturing DV video easily w/o any problems.

2. check RAM for integrity. MS has a tool for this. Bad ram = bad problems.

3. check HD for integrity. HD makers have tools for this.

4. defrag HD (should not be necessarily with any PC this fast)

5. Make sure the HD is on UDMA mode (see device manager).

6. Make sure the jumpers on the HD is correct.

7. Make sure the HD cable is a 80-pin shielded/recommended IDE cable.

8. Make sure it's not the background auto-update from Microsoft, virus
scanner, background or other app that's causing the problem - here, turn
them all off (CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task mgr), unplug it from the
net.

9. Test captures using any other DV capturing program. Free ones are out
there, as well as demo version of solid programs like Sony Vegas Video.
i'd test the free & small programs first.

10. dropped frames = loss of sync = problems later editing and syncing
files. Bad.

"peter" wrote ...
Absolutely. The D drive should store *only data* (video, etc.) files.

The application programs should be installed in the normal place
(C:\Program Files)

Reason: You are forcing the D drive to switch back and forth
between accessing files needed to run the programs, and the
real-time video data.

The C: drive is ideal for putting all the computer stuff on. The
needs of running application programs (including Premire,
Encore, etc.) and the requiremens of running the operating
system (including accessing the cache file, etc.) are completely
compatible with each other.

Sharing application files and real-time data files on the same
drive is NOT compatible.

peter wrote:
I would suggest using the program Scenalyzer Live. It is very stable
and had never dropped a frame, even on my PIII 866mhz computer. I
mainly edit with a P4 3.0 ghz, and can even be editing while Scenalyzer
is capturing in the background. You can download the program for free
to make sure it works for you before purchasing. I highly recommend it.
Here is the link: www.scenalyzer.com
Bill

Hi,
If your C and D drive are master and slave on the some HD controller channel
you can also have hickups as the HD controller can only address one hard
drive at the time.
Putting the D drive as a master or slave to the CD ROM is also no good as
the CD ROM slows down the HD Controller.

I have my capture drives connected to a PCI HD controller card and that
works a treat.
For drive defragmenting I use Perfect Disk 7.0 as it has an option of doing
the defragmenting on a timeclock ie. 1:00 am start and it will even bring
the PC out of hibernation to do the task. It can be set to do a smart
defrag (quick) that is good for the program drive but for the capture drive
you need a "dumb" StringTheFilesTogether type of defrag.

Regards,

Martin

"Richard Crowley" <richard.7.crowley@intel.com> wrote in message
news:db1nkq$q47$1@news01.intel.com...

peter wrote:

Here's the math 29.97 (ntsc) frames /sec * 1min = 1740 frames /
minute * 10 mins = 174000 frames

and youre loosing a few ? No I don't think you have much to worry
about. Still it is a good idea to keep this stuff on a separate
partition that the OS for a few reasons like the others have stated.

Try configuring your system instead of just thinking you need more :-)

If you notice anything from skipped frames it will be jumpy playback.
YOu won;t notice anything from what you are describing though


jason





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On 7/13/2005, j b managed to type:
Well, I get 10*1740 = 17400. Am I missing something?

I also get 60*29.97 = 1798.2, but that is a smaller error...Looks like
you left the .97 off.

HTH,
Gino

<SNIP>

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Gene E. Bloch wrote:

posted that. Still though.


Most likely yes..


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For me , said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle,"
and he reached his hand up for it.

Homepage http://home.cogeco.ca/~jabean
cover songs server http://musicpage.kicks-ass.org/

On 7/14/2005, j b managed to type:
Well, your argument is certainly still valid - what more can we ask?

Gino

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Are you by any chance capturing with Non-drop frame timecode?

"peter" <pet.tra@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message
news:1121201835.940586.327080@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com...

"Innocent Bystander" wrote ...
"Drop-frame" timecode only means that some of the
frame NUMBERS are dropped. It doesn't actully drop
any FRAMES.

"Non-drop-frame" timecode means that no frame numbers
are dropped. The numbers will start getting ahead of the
real time because the framerate is 29.97 FPS.

None of this makes any difference to most casual video
producers. It is only when you need the video timecode to
have some relationship to the actual wall-clock time that
you need drop-frame timecode.