[Brooktop]

I have a Canon MV800 mini-dv. My pc is:
Athlon XP3000 (2.1 Ghz)
with 1 Gb ram,
a nVidia FX5900XT
80Gb Maxtor HDD

I have a problem capturing video...either in Ulead Video Studio or Windows Movie Maker. My Firewire card is not a fancy one...a generic PCI slot card with USB and FW (via OHC compliant iee 1394 bus host controller). It has worked a couple of times, but mostly it either drops frames or just freezes up the programme (that can't even be quit by doing a Ctrl, Alt, Del).

Conrol Panel > Device Manager reports that the card is working ok. but there is a warning under Network Adapters > 1394 Net adapter that says 'This device cannot start. (Code 10)'. Could that be the problem?

It seems unlikely that there is a fault with the FW card or cable as it would be a constant problem. I've tried disconnecting broadband, shutting down my firewall and virus checker, to no avail.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

[rickyt]

Not sure what the exact problem could be but, remove the firewire card . Reboot and delete any errors in device manager .Close down and fit the Firewire card in another PCI slot.I've have found sometimes you get a fault in the slots with certain items .Some people take the cards out including graphics or memory cards and rub the contacts with a rubber , just to clean them in case there making a faulty connection.Worth a try .

[MarkE19]

I would say that the most obvious cause of your problems would be lack of disc space!
Capture of DV footage as an .AVI file on a PC will eat up around 14Gb of space for every 1 hour captured . So you say you have an 80Gb HDD, but the chances are that is the actual size rather than free space with Windows and all the other progs on the PC taking up a fair bit of the 80Gb. As the drive get full the files get more fragmented as the system searches for space which then reduces the performance of the HDD and causes more problems. I would recommend you get a second HDD and only use it for captured video - don't put any programs on it!
You might get away with the one HDD if you defragment it before captureing any video, but a new HDD will make life much easier, especially if you want to create a DVD as you need more space for the editing files and then file conversion. I always try to have double the space used for the origional capture when doing any editing.

Is the firewire card in the PCI slot next to the graphics AGP slot? If so then you should try to move it to another PCI slot as the AGP slot and the closest PCI slot on many MoBos share resources that can cause problems. The card being a generic OHCI ieee1394 interface card is not going to be the cause of any problems as this is what many people use. Even an expensive firewire card will be ieee1394 complient as this is the standards used for firewire.

Mark.

[Brooktop]

Thanks Guys

I have over 40 Gb HDD free and I've been trying to capture in wmv - MUCH smaller file sizes than DV-AVI. And it seems to lock up straight after a few seconds..not after minutes of processing.

The FW card is quite a few slots from the graphics card.

Does that exclamation mark by the 1394 Net Adapter mean anything?

[redsox_mark]

Getting that error isn’t “normal”… a quick read of this
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;314464

seems to indicate that maybe something is non-standard about your hardware, so the standard Windows drivers aren’t enough, and “device does not fit the defined and supplied Windows class drivers”.

The other thing that raises a flag is you say you are capturing .wmv! The footage from the camcorder is DV of course, so this implies that encoding to .wmv is taking place on the fly. This kind of encoding is very CPU intensive and generally can’t be done in real time.. how are you doing the encoding? Have you tried to simply capture DV?

(another) Mark

[Brooktop]

Hi Redsox

Tried capturing straight to DV-AVI - no difference (and I'd defragged the HDD).

I'll try uninstalling the FW card and then re-installing it.

[MarkE19]

As '(another) Mark' said it does sound like you have a problem with the firewire card. An ! beside the device listing in 'Device Manager' normally means that there is a problem with it. I would say the reinstall is a good idea and if that doesn't fix it then you could try the card in another PCI slot to make sure that the slot isn't the cause of the problem. Other than that you could always try another generic firewire card, at least they only cost about £10 to buy.

Mark.

[Brooktop]

the ! mark is only by the 1394 net adapter box. the ieee 1394 controller bit says the device is working properly. i've disabled the net adapter bit and uninstalled it, but it made no difference. of course, when i restart the pc, it's back.

i removed the fw card and put it back in to make sure it wasn't loose.

it's odd that when i ask movie maker to show the preview, it shows the vid and how it's dropping frames - but when i leave it unchecked (ie needing less resources), it makes movie maker unresponsive and i end up having to reboot.

i don't know if this has any bearing, but when i connect the camcorder to my pc (via the fw) and press 'play' - i can see the footage on screen. wouldn't this suggest that it's transferring data ok and that the problem lies with some software?

[DigiStuff]

Hi,

Try looking at the hard drive settings in Device Manager. Need to make sure DMA is selected. See image in this previous link. Roxio Videowave7 Buffering problems

Hope this helps

DigiStuff

[Brooktop]

Thanks Digistuff, but DMA is enabled on both. Any other ideas?

[Brooktop]

Looks like this has sorted it: Thanks everyone!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

[Brooktop]

Damn! Spoke too soon! I've got exactly the same problem this morning.

I can't understand why every now and again, it will work ok.

When I switched on this morning...it went to the Bios screen with a message about the CPU speed and not shutting down properly last time. I kept the CPU speed at 2100, but I don't know if that's right and I don't know if this is anything to do with the problem or just one of those strange quirks you get with PCs from time to time.

I'm getting fed up of this now!

[Commline]

Check to see if any other program was using your capture device at the same time. It's best to capture and edit from a drive other than the drive your program is on. The 1394 problem should be unrelated to your FW card 1394 is a network card.

[MarkE19]

Originally Posted by Commline

The 1394 problem should be unrelated to your FW card 1394 is a network card.

ieee1394 is the firewire port - a firewire port is a network port that can be used for connecting external devices such as HDD's etc as well as a camcorder.

Mark.

[Commline]

Originally Posted by MarkE19

ieee1394 is the firewire port - a firewire port is a network port that can be used for connecting external devices such as HDD's etc as well as a camcorder.

Mark.

I stand corrected