[den9112]

hi , i am i am captureing with a sony trv 14 , adobe prem pro then encore . i am dropping on average 10 frames per 60 sec i know my editing and authouring software is good , so could it be down to camcorder or the firewire card and cable of wich i only paid £25for both . after spending a long time getting to grips with adobe software (with help from curt wriggley)i am a little dissapointed i know my camcorder is not top of the range , and i was hopeing it was not camcorder but the cable and card or do i accept that i am always going to get some dropped frames , and that it is normal for entry level camcorders . thanks in advance . dennis

[vonhosen]

In my experience dropped frames are more likely to be OS / hard drive related than Premiere or camera. Have you got DMA enabled on your hard drive ?

no it's not normal for any camcorder however much 'bottom of range' it has everything to do with your computer, not only it's specification but your settings and 'housekeeping' - are you defragging frequently ?? - do you empty your internet folders, do you regularly check your registry etc with something like 'Windoctor'

I propably spend around 25% of my computing time just doing 'housework'

[MarkE19]

In my experience the biggest cause of dropped frames are background programmes such as antivirus and screensavers etc. ALL of these should be stopped before any capture is started. You would probably be surprised by the number of background progs that the average PC has running and therefore need to be stopped. Rather than doing this manually I use a free prog, that can be found by doing an internet search, called EndItAll (all one word). If you have trouble finding it let me know and I'll e-mail you a copy of it, just PM me your e-mail address.

Another thing that might help is to check how your HDD and CD/DVD drives are connected. You should have the HDD as primary master and if you have a second HDD that should be primary slave. Any CD/DVD drives should be on the secondary IDE channel as these drives can slow down the HDD if on the same IDE channel.

Mark.

yes good point Mark at times there appear to be 50 programs running on my PC - the prog is now called ENDitAll2 and can be obtained from :-
http://home.ptd.net/~don5408/toolbox/enditall/
it doesn't actually mention compatability with Windows XP on that site but I use it on XP with no problems at all

I rarely use it when capturing as I personnally never suffer dropped frames , but ALWAYS ALWAYS use it when burning DVD's or DV back to camcorder

[MarkE19]

Yes I also have EndItAll2 running with no problems under XP.
I think that dropped frames are more likely on an older, underpowered PC. Newer, faster PC's have a lot more spare power to capture etc and still run the background progs. When firewire video capture was new the PC would struggle to just do that, now any new(ish) PC can do NLE in its sleep.
As there is no mention of the spec of the PC being used it might well be worth mentioning that 512Mb or even 1Gb or more of memory will help stop dropped frames as well as speeding up any rendering and file conversion.

Mark.

[cyberheater]

I've got a humble Athlon 1800 with 512 megs of ram and a super cheapy 20 quid firewire card running Winxp service pack 1 and haven't dropped a single frame once.
I do use a separate harddrive to do my capture though and I keep it tidy.

I must be one of the lucky ones. I run a browser/email/music apps all at the same time with no issues.

I strongly feel is down to the speed of you hard drive. Get a 7200 rpm drive and only use it for vid use.