Replies in this thread must reflect DV capture, because it is almost
impossable to capture a VHS tape without at least one dropped frame
somewhere along the way due to sync problems with the tape. Even if the
program you are using doesn't report any dropped frames, that doesn't mean
anything. Vurtual VCR does a very good job reporting dropped frames, but
some others... you can unplug the dam VCR from the inputs and they won't
report any dropped frames.

A few dropped frames during a VHS capture are normal. Sometimes I can
capture 30 minutes with no dropped frames, but then, boom, there goes one or
two right out the window. If more than 2 are dropped in a row, I stop and
back the tape up a bit, and start re-capturing. I join them together again
later in Vegas. (I usually capture to raw AVI or huffyuv, not mpeg. On the
fly mpeg captures arn't as good as when you render later and it takes
hours.)

Sanman
"Doc" <docsavage20@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f0c1bc20.0307141355.787265d5@posting.google.c om...

"Sanman" <me@you.com> wrote in message news:<vh722mn31ddo53@corp.supernews.com>...

I'm doing analog capture. I seem to get roughly 1 drop per thousand
when I use AV_IO.

What I've done so far is enable DMA in all drives, have a dedicated
capture drive which is a 60 gig 7200 rpm Western Digitial drive.
System is a 550 mhz PIII, 384 megs RAM, Win98 First edition.

Would appreciate additional suggestions as to what measures to take.
Watching the playback, I can't say the dropped frames are even
noticeable, but would like to get the maximum possible performance.

If you are doing a digital file transfer (DV, DVCam, DVCPro, Digital-8 for
example) -- no dropped frames are acceptable. If you are performing a
digitization -- analog material that is being sampled & compressed as you
capture -- your results will vary based on the quality of your source & the
demands of your digitization choices. 'Acceptable' in that instance will be
your judgement call.

GB

"Doc" <docsavage20@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f0c1bc20.0307150312.529c91b0@posting.google.c om...
I would think 1 drop per thousand in analog capture should not be a problem
comparing to the analog-digital transfer losses. The only thing is that
dropped frames are reported while transfer losses are hidden.

Try to cleanup your system as much as possible, deframent all drives, shut
down as much background task as possible while capturing (such as screen
saver, scheduled tasks, networking services, antivirus, firewalls.... - be
cautious with firewall removal ;-).
If you have the budget, upgrade to P4, at least 512M, XP and an ATA-133,
10,000rpm harddisk.

That's because the camera is filling in the dropped frames with other
frames, or "fixing" the missing frames before it leaves the camera DV jack.
The computer NEVER even sees the dropped frames because they are repaired or
replaced before being sent to the computer. If the camera sees a bad frame,
or the tape loses sync for a frame, the camera will simply use the previous
frame and fill the gap. This would be hard to notice when playing back the
captured video because one dropped frame is pretty insignificant. Your
computer gets a nice uniform, time coded, freshly synchronized video -
hardly anything for a computer to complain about.

in the same spot every time I capture the tape. If you forward scan the
tape while capturing, you lose a slew of frames. And if you unplug the vcr,
as I mentioned, you will lose some frames while a sync is re-established.
If you stop the tape and your vcr switches to a blue screen, you will lose a
frame because the blue screen is not in sync with the video you were
playing. Your capture device is relying on the control/sync track that is
recorded on the edge of the tape for its frame data. If there is some
dropout on that track, or if the tape is crinkled, one or many sync pulses
might be absent. The capture device has no way of knowing what to do
without these pulses. Even your DV camera that you use to get your video
into the computer will drop frames in this case. It just fixes them so your
computer doesn't notice. The video information is useless to any capture
device, or TV for that matter without the framework that tells our TVs and
capture devices what to do with it.

Sanman

"Sanman" <me@you.com> wrote in message
news:vh9gmp4k42e9c5@corp.supernews.com...
If the computer does not see the dropped frames, then why would the original
poster complain?
The capturing device will report the condition to the original poster? Did I
mentioned analog to digital transfer losses? What can we do about it apart
from changing the capturing device?

I will not say you are wrong or whatsoever (as that is too technical for
me), but please don't make simple questions too complicated.

Because a digital dropped frame is missing, but an analog>digital 'dropped
frame' may still be a frame ... just a frame filled with useless junk. This
may not bother some users -- it would give me fits.

GB

Because he is doing analogue capture and I assume he isn't using a DV
converter because he hasn't mentioned it. To me, an analogue capture with
no other explaination means plugging the vcr right into the analogue inputs
in the computer video card. :-)

"Sanman" <me@you.com> wrote in message
news:vh722mn31ddo53@corp.supernews.com...
I capture from VHS using a Canopus ADVC-100 to an external
WD 120GB drive with Vegas on a lowly 900 MHz Dell laptop.
I never get dropped frames and I have no audio sync problems.
I guess I should be glad it's only "almost impossible" to do this.

Dennis Vogel

"Sanman" <me@you.com> wrote in message
news:vh9gmp4k42e9c5@corp.supernews.com...
Wow, do I live a charmed life! I can fast forward my VCR while
capturing with my aforementioned setup and never lose frames
then either.

Dennis Vogel

"Hykan" <hykan@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:bf1600$2cde$1@news.hgc.com.hk...
Absolutely.

While it would be a nice setup to have it is overkill for
video capture. A decent 7200 rpm drive works fine on
my Dell 900 MHz laptop with 256 MB of memory.

You don't have to spend that kind of money to do video
capture.

Dennis Vogel

You are using DV capture, so your case is NOT an example of VHS tape
capture. You are using an external DV sampling device to convert your
analog signal to DV, and then transferring DV .... much as the poster you
are sticking it to said.

GB

"Dennis Vogel@patmedia.net" <dennisvogel@patmedia.net> wrote in message
news:bf9967$h53$1@ngspool-d02.news.aol.com...
tune up his system a bit.
I am using a PIII 700Mhz with 512 right now w/o any problem except I have to
sit and wait while capturing. Sometime, even a background downloading may
cause dropped frames.
I don't know if my dream machine will fix that ;-).

"Dennis Vogel@patmedia.net" <dennisvogel@patmedia.net> wrote in message
news:bf98ko$gpf$1@ngspool-d02.news.aol.com...
Ok, you misunderstood. Capturing with a DV converter will not deliver
dropped frames to your computer because the DV encoding corrects any dropped
frames and fills them in with neighboring frames. The DV stream that enters
your computer is perfect, as long as your computer can handle it. Your
capturing program will not see any dropped frames because the DV converter
repairs them, but they are still there.

I was referring to capturing from analogue straight to an analogue capture
card, like an ATI All In Wonder. In that case, any dropped frames will be
detected and reported by your capture program.

Sanman

"Sanman" <me@you.com> wrote in message
news:vhkaf16ae0ut4d@corp.supernews.com...
Vegas 4.

Dennis Vogel

"Dennis Vogel@patmedia.net" <dennisvogel@patmedia.net> wrote in message
news:bfhjbf$f3u$1@ngspool-d02.news.aol.com...
Vegas 4 analogue capture does not report dropped frames properly. I tested
this by using Vegas 4 to capture off of my TV tuner card. While I was
capturing, I unplugged the cable and recorded snow. Then I reconnected the
cable and stopped the capture. Turns out that the program stopped capturing
video after the cable was disconnected but continued to capture audio.
Definitely many, many dropped frames. Yet, the dropped frames reported were
0. Something tells me that's wrong. I think that indicator is only for DV
capture through firewire, because during an 8mm capture through my D8
camcorder to firewire, It did report a few dropped frames. But from an
analogue source, that dropped frames indicator doesn't work.

Sanman

"Steve Maki" <steve@oakcom.com> wrote in message news:0qmrhvg34gsrs8gd49i1hrqq5aika7j0ct@4ax.com...
with the performance, so I tried moving it to a dual Intel 1000 running Win 2000 and
was dropping a LOT of frames (with Vegas or Vid cap 32). I'm only trying to do
320 x 240 for the web. What codec are you using?

David

David McCall wrote:

I'm really surprised you're having trouble at half resolution.

I've used both Huffyuv and uncompressed. The Osprey is mainly
an experiment to see if I can notice an improvement over DV.

I have it in an Abit AT7-Max2, Athlon 1.7 MHZ, 1 gig ram, and
capturing to a pair of WD 120 GB drives striped via the MB's built
in Highpoint RAID controller. Running W2K with NTFS on both
the boot and capture drives.

Capturing FULL rez with Huffyuv, I can go an hour or more with
either no dropped frames or just 2 or 3 - if I'm careful to
run with a stripped down configuration. That's using either
the Vegas capture program or iuVCR capture.

Video looks outstanding - possibly better than the great video
I get through the ADVC-100 DV converter.

I don't use it much though because of the a/v sync problem. If I
capture an hour of audio with the Osprey, it ends up being a
couple seconds shorter than the video. If I use the Osprey for
video only and run the audio through my M-Audio Delta 66, the
audio is a second or 2 LONGER than the video. Or it might be the
other way around, can't remember. I wish there was a good full
rez analog card with truly locked a/v.

Regards,
--
Steve Maki