This more a hardware than a video question; but is does have an effect
on my "raw materials". In capturing video from my digital camcorder
(using Firewire & Vegas Movie Studio), all is 100% perfect when going
to my desktop PC. If I try capturing with my laptop however (Dell
Inspiron 6400, same OS, software & cable), it drops frames like a
sieve. Clearly the laptop isn't up to the task.

It's only a minor inconveniece to be tied to the desktop box, but can
you tell me where the weak link in the laptop probably lies? I'm
assuming it's the video capabilities (or lack thereof) on the
motherboard with no chance of upgrade without buying a new laptop; but
if anyone could offer an alternative solution, I'm all ears.

TIA,
Joe F.

"rb608" wrote ...
Do you have other stuff running on your laptop?
Wireless networking, etc, etc, etc?
Do you have a slow (5400RPM) hard drive?
Do you have only one hard drive?
Is you hard drive full, cluttered, fragmented?

There are lots of things that prevent smooth
video capture. There are several resources online
with checklists for improving the video capture
and editing performance of a computer.

On Dec 6, 11:13 am, "Richard Crowley" <rcrow...@xp7rt.net> wrote:
Not much, no.


No. Well, it's installed and it's there; but I rarely use it.


Yes.


One drive, but partitioned (40 & 12). I also have a couple external
HDs, but not for capture.


Not full; at least 15 GB free space, but probably cluttered &
fragmented.


Thanks. I'll defrag the drive & look for those resources. Can't
hurt.

On Thu, 6 Dec 2007 08:13:47 -0800, "Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xp7rt.net>
wrote:

Kill it all :-)

Disbale it all :-)

Not necessarily a problem. Since you got external drives, why don't you
capture to an external drive on your desktop, and then you can chooese
which system to edit on.

Can be a problem. Multiple partitions don't help (only in keeping the drive
less fragmented).

Clean & defrag

Exactly.

cheers

-martin-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

On Dec 6, 12:42 pm, Martin Heffels <goo...@flikken.net> wrote:
My external is also a 5400 rpm drive (WD160 Passport). Tons and tons
of space there, but I thought (from a previous discussion) that
running the capture across USB wasn't helping. I'd as soon go
straight to the onboard drive & move it later.

On Thu, 6 Dec 2007 10:13:27 -0800 (PST), rb608 <junkmail608@verizon.net>
wrote:

Capturing via USB does not really work well. Some people claim to have it
working via USB2, but I am still not convinced by those claims. Firewire is
a proven product, and the way to go.
If you have a slow drive, and a slow connection to the drive, you could
capture in a low-resolution format (proxy-format), and later, after the
edit is finished, recapture your material in full resolution. This assumes
a good and non-interrupted timecode on your master-tapes. You could also
capture at full resolution on your main system, and create the proxy on
there.

cheers

-martin-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

rb608 <junkmail608@verizon.net> writes:

Copying the data across USB probably takes more CPU resources than
sending it to the internal drive. However, if there aren't other USB
devices competing for the controller (i.e. your video is coming in via
1394 not USB, no USB "port replicator") it may work fine. And if the
external drive is not used for anything but video capture, it can
provide better throughput than an internal drive that's doing other
things besides writing video data.

Dave

On Dec 6, 3:14 pm, da...@cs.ubc.ca (Dave Martindale) wrote:
Thanks Richard, Martin, & Dave. I'll try a few of the ideas/
alternatives/improvements you guys have suggested. Might be just the
excuse I need to upgrade the HD too. <g>

Tx,
Joe F.

rb608 <junkmail608@verizon.net> writes:

For video capture, having a separate drive that's only handling the
captured data may be more useful than speeding up the internal drive.

Rationale: long disk seeks are always slow compared to the latency of
waiting for the right sector to arrive when the head is already over the
correct cylinder. A drive used only for video (at the time you're
capturing - you can use it for other things at other times) will leave
the head "parked" over the cylinder you last wrote to, which is almost
always the same, or one cyclinder over from, where you're going to write
next. Further, there's never anything else in its queue waiting to be read
or written. So writes to this drive are always low-latency.

The system drive, no matter how fast it spins (reduces rotational
latency) or how dense it is (increases data rate), will be accessing
files other than your video data from time to time. This means long
seeks halfway across the drive and back again every once in a while, and
it can also mean a bunch of read or write requests sometimes competing
with your video data writes.

An example of this from the non-video world: I'm a programmer by trade,
writing videogame code. The final link step for a game takes something
like 2.5 minutes, not using a lot of CPU, but completely saturating the
disk that the code lives on. That'w when linking for one platform with
the system otherwise idle. If you try doing two links (for two
different platforms) at the same time, it doesn't take twice as long (as
you might expect) but 4 or 5 times as long. The multiple parallel links
force the disk to do a lot more seeking, and its performance goes way
down. One way to speed the process up a lot is to put the libraries and
temp files in a RAM drive, which has zero seek time.

Dave

On Dec 6, 5:18 pm, da...@cs.ubc.ca (Dave Martindale) wrote:
Well, that makes a lot of sense. Methinks I'll try emptying &
defragging the D: drive & see how that works. Thanks again.

Joe F.

Martin Heffels wrote:

Using Sony's Vegas, I've done 3 hr. captures to an external (7200 rpm)
USB drive with no dropped frames at all.

Mike

Ages ago I used a 1.6GHz laptop to capture about 90 hours of video via
Firewire to a USB2 external disk.
Worked flawlessly.

The external drive also had a Firewire interface. If I tried capturing
from FW to the disk using its FW interface it would hang after about
40 minutes or so.
Some cheap FW external drives are a waste of space - but,
surprisingly, their USB2 interfaces are okay!