I have never tried this before so i may be doing something wrong, i have connected my camcorder to my pc with a firewire cable, when i capture the footage it seems to jump every 30 seconds or so. Its almost like playing a tape and it sticks. The video pauses very briefly and sound jumps. I have tried capturing the footage using both ulead Movie Factory and Microsoft Movie maker both with the same results

When i play the tape plugged straight into my tv it plays perfectly

Has anyone got any ideas??

Thanks

I have also tried putting the firewire card in my work pc vut no luck there either

[mmace]

make sure you are capturing to a seperate drive to the one Windows is installed on.
Also, it may be helpful to close any other software that's running

what software are you using?

I was using Ulead Movie Maker and then i tried Windows Movie Maker, both with same results.

I will try it again tonight and close everything on my pc i probably did have some other stuff running in the background

It is not necessary to have a seperate drive to transfer your video, hundreds of us capture to the one drive every day without any problems - it is important though to stop all other software during the transfer. Working with video is very resource intensive and you should not try to do anything else at the same time.

What format are you attempting to capture as - it makes a difference

If you capture as DV (.avi) then you are simply transferring the video from your camcorder to the PC with no conversion - this usually gives a smooth faultless transfer.

Capturing to Mpeg means not only transferring but converting at the same time and your computer can often not keep up with the conversion and stops capturing (drops frames) while it processes what is already transferred.

Capturing to .wmv now not only has to transfer and convert but has to apply very heavy compression at the same time - your computer cannot cope - andsometimes just gives up completely

+

[mmace]

Originally Posted by Brian110507

It is not necessary to have a seperate drive to transfer your video, hundreds of us capture to the one drive every day without any problems - it is important though to stop all other software during the transfer. Working with video is very resource intensive and you should not try to do anything else at the same time.

it is necessary for some people, I'm trying to rule things out for him, it's recommended by most people to capture to a seperate drive. If you're being picky then it's not necessary to stop all other software, I have all sorts open on mine while capturing HDV and even browse the web and use outlook while it's capturing without dropping any frames. It's totally down to the PC and the software, he may need to capture to a sepearate drive, he may need to close all other software, he may have a faulty firewire cable, it may be all of these things, it may be none of these things, there's no need to dismiss the extra dive just because it works for others like using other software at the same time works fine for me

Thousands of people who do not even have a second drive capture video all the time with no problems.

While it may be DESIRABLE to capture to a seperate drive it is by no means NECESSARY especially if you haven't got one - I see no point in telling the OP that he has to have a second drive which means spending money and maybe puts them off doing video editing - I'm just trying to help them find a solution using the equipment they have - if when we have tried everything else it looks like a seperate drive is the only solution then that is the time to say "buy a seperate drive".

[rickyt]

One of the main things people overlook is there PC spec . Dont assume that all PC's will do everything . I started my video editing work on a AMD 1.4 g and it worked perfectly for capturing/editing & writing to disk .This was a stand alone PC with only the programs that I needed to edit on and no programs associated with the net. Now ,if I was to use the same PC [ if I still had it ] with internet connection & things like a firewall , anti-virus , anti-spyware etc ......I may very well have problems .This scenariro is worse if your using something like these Security Center's people often buy , where the program is scaning for virus's , spyware , checking this & checking that .The point I'm making here is , anything running on your PC that interupts the data flow may cause the jumping or hesitant capture . As someone has suggested ,close down the anti-virus ,assuming you have one installed and any other program that may be running in the background and try to capture a small section again .HTH

[mmace]

Originally Posted by Brian110507

Thousands of people who do not even have a second drive capture video all the time with no problems.

While it may be DESIRABLE to capture to a seperate drive it is by no means NECESSARY especially if you haven't got one - I see no point in telling the OP that he has to have a second drive which means spending money and maybe puts them off doing video editing - I'm just trying to help them find a solution using the equipment they have - if when we have tried everything else it looks like a seperate drive is the only solution then that is the time to say "buy a seperate drive".

same as it isn't NECESSARY to close any programmes at all as you stated

[MarkE19]

OK to try and prevent any more arguments - there is no 'you must do' but several suggestions to help reduce/eliminate dropped frames. Lets keep the posts helpful and see if we can help the OP

Right, I suggest you track down a copy of the free & helpfull program called EndItAll2 from the internet to stop all unwanted background programs (PM me if you want me to e-mail you a copy - but be patient as I am on nightshifts all weekend).
Defragment your HDD as this may well help. Also you should have plenty of sapare space as .AVI files eat up space at approx 13Gb per hour captured. As space runs low the performance of the HDD drops. I always suggest that to capture 1 hour of footage you should have around 25Gb of space. Also make sure that DMA is enabled for the HDD as this often improves performance.

There a loads of things to try, but start with what has already been suggested to see if that helps. A search of this forum for 'dropped frames' etc should bring up plenty of reading to keep you buisy for a few hours.

Good luck and let us know how you get on,
Mark.