when i try and capture video from my dv camera (via firewire) it will capture for about 2-5 mins then it will stop capturing (although pic still moving in viewfinder) I then try to close capture software (i've tried various dif. ones - win dv, windows movie maker, ulead etc.) and it freezes up so I have to restart PC! I have tried the firewire in various different pci slots and it makes no difference.
Any help would be much appreciated as it is driving me mad
thankyou.

[kelvin]

What spec is the machine?

K.

windows xp
service pack 2
AMD athlon XP1700+
1.48 ghz, 512mb of ram

[MarkE19]

Try some or all of these to see if that helps:

Make sure you have plenty of spare space on the HDD. DV capture takes 1Gb for every 4 minutes. A 1 hour tape will use approx 14Gb and you should never get even close to a full disk!
Defragment the HDD on a regular basis.
Make sure the HDD has DMA enabled.
Stop all background programs such as antivirus, and also disable screen/power save functions.

All the above should help, but IMHO the most likely cause is that your HDD is formatted as FAT32 and therefore you have reached the max size for a single file. My suggestion would be to convert the HDD to NTFS if this is the case and that should solve the problem as you can then have a single file up to the size of the space available on the HDD.

Mark.

thanks for the advice
i think it must be because I have hardly any memory left on the pc (17gb).
Do you think that could be it?
thanks
faye

[MarkE19]

Well 17Gb should be enough to capture more than a few minutes of video. But a HDD performance will be reduced as it gets full, plus space will be used by things such as the 'swap file', so it could be!
Due to the fact that it stops after only a couple of minutes capture I still think the problem is most likely to be down to the fact that the HDD is formatted as FAT32 - is it FAT32 or NTFS?
Your best bet in my opinion is to get another HDD and format it as NTFS and use this as a video only drive (don't install any programs on it). With a 120Gb or bigger drive available for well under £100 this should be a fairly cheap solution and will give you space for several hours of footage.

Mark.

The hard drive is NTFS
I think I will just buy a new hard drive
thanks for the advice
faye