Video Capture - Dropped Packets
 

OK techie question just on the off chance someone knows ;)

I shoot my video in HD, pretty decent camera (£4000 !) I rip the content off the Mini DV tapes with HDVSplit, and we have a pretty fancy heavy spec i7 computer to do this...

Most of the time I have no issues, but sometimes I get a lot of lost packets/frames.

Anyone got any idea what can cause this ? :helpme

we had some issues too, sometimes its as simple as cleaning the heads, checking the firewire cable(assuming its cable) and even as restarting the 'puter after each capture sounds silly but that has worked for us...
Cheers

Actually
 

Actually sounds spot on mate... I do indeed clean the heads every time it happens, and re boot the computer...

Another thing I do is turn off all the other programs and disconnect from the internet to reduce the chance of any drain on resources on the computer.

This usually works... even though on some occassions I have had to do it 3 or 4 times, which obviously really slows things down !

It makes me think it's nothing to do with the actual quality of the tape itself...

It's not the tape. Dropped packets means packet loss on the network or the connection to the device.

How is your camera connected to your computer? Do you know how fast your hard disk is and what kind of bus it is using? Also, Don't capture to a network drive - capture directly to your computer's drive.

Here's what else you can do:
- Make sure you have no other programs running that suck up resources like CPU and Ram

- Add more Ram. Computers write faster to ram than hard drives

- Make sure the drivers for your hard disk controller and motherboard are up to date. You can get a significant speed boost with good drivers.

Thanks...
 

Thanks :thumbsup

I'll have to ask my techie guy in regards to the connection... I do think it's called a i.LINK cabel, via the HDV/DV interface on the camera...

I also do capture to the computer and not an external Hard drive... :thumbsup

We shoot with a Sony HVR-Z5E

Hey
 

Any more input ?

I think Mark hit it on the head.

Are you capturing, splitting, and previewing all at the same time?
If so, consider capturing first, then splitting.

Nope...
 

Just capturing :)

In that case, how does your transfer rate compare to the tested unbuffered drive write speed?

Is SuperFetch turned off, and antivirus?

Other than that, I'd drop to single user mode and run a kernel with real time patches to devote 100% of resources to the capture, but I don't suppose any of that applies to Windows.

Hmmm...
 

This is where my untechie side kicks in... will speak to my techie partner tomorrow when he's about :) :thumbsup

Read #4 several more times.

Done...
 

Done that what next ? :error