[bigbaz]

I am having a problem transferring footage from my DV Camcorder to my laptop. I've been using Sony video capture 6.0 within the Vegas Pro 8.0 program. The transfer is approx 30 Min's long and I end with approx 50 clips. When the copying has finished I keep ending up with 20 dropped frames. This then shows up as juddering throughout the edited video. Any ideas please ?

[glesgaguyav]

Dropped Frames: Best practice is to capture to a separate HD or a Partion on your C: drive.

Sony Vegas: Make sure you have the proper Project Settings ideally the same as the captured clips

[bigbaz]

Originally Posted by glesgaguyav

Dropped Frames: Best practice is to capture to a separate HD or a Partion on your C: drive.

Sony Vegas: Make sure you have the proper Project Settings ideally the same as the captured clips

glesgaguyav Thanks for that. So would I be better off capturing to an external Hard Drive ? Also How would I know what the settings are and how do I change them ? Sorry to be a pain !

[senu]

An external drive , A separate partition on the same system or separate internal HDD ( from the system ) would be OK for capture.
However dropped frames may also occur on any of them if the drive is fragmented, or there are too many programs running in the background ( Antivirus, anti spyware, ) or any "monitoring" programs that load up with windows.
If you want to specify a " default" capture folder, open up the capture program ( I have Ver 6)
under the menu items
select:options
Preferences
then
open TAB: Disc management
You can then browse to any Capture folder you wish: you can put more than one

[bigbaz]

Originally Posted by senu

An external drive , A separate partition on the same system or separate internal HDD ( from the system ) would be OK for capture.
However dropped frames may also occur on any of them if the drive is fragmented, or there are too many programs running in the background ( Antivirus, anti spyware, ) or any "monitoring" programs that load up with windows.
If you want to specify a " default" capture folder, open up the capture program ( I have Ver 6)
under the menu items
select:options
Preferences
then
open TAB: Disc management
You can then browse to any Capture folder you wish: you can put more than one

Senu Thanks for your help, however I've tried your recommendations and this time the capture started ok, but after 10mins the Camcorder carried on running but my laptop just froze, stopping the transfer, with the fan constantly on !

[senu]

That should not happen
What are you capturing to? EXT HDD?
Have you defragmented the laptops HDD?

[bigbaz]

That's a good point I will defragment, maybe because I've tried the transfer so many times its cluttered up the disc at one particular point. Senu, may I take this opportunity to thank you for all advice given much appreciated !

[senu]

No problem, and good luck with it !

Similar query answer here
Dropped Frames using MiniDV camcorder

[glesgaguyav]

Try not to capture such a large file in one go, you can stop capturing at any point and then resume again, once you have captured all the footage just join/edit them in the timeline and then render as one file, if any other program is accessing the disk while you are capturing then you may get dropped frames so if you are not confident about the read/write speeds on your system, then turn all other programs off that run in the background including your Screen saver.

[senu]

By default, Vegas does split the captured file into clips which are in fact separate avi files unless you specify not to.
I haven't found that capturing say 1 hr of footage causes any problems,, but it is certainly worth trying.
A possible problem is that the way Vegas captures for a particular project is that it displays them all in one place.
Should you capture footage in different "tries" , it would be worth opening the project first then importing so that they will be associated with the same project and the clips will hopefully be numbered sequentially for clarity when editing