Ques re:Dazzle 90

cubix

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I know this is not the best of kit but it all I could get my hands on. The problem I have is I have some old Hi-8 tapes which I want to get onto the pc so I can preserve them. The only thing is I only have access to an Amd Xp2000/512mb machine a the moment and every time I try to capture it from the camcorder to the pc it seems to drop frames. Nothing else is running on the machine while I am doing it so did not think there would be a problem, I am using a cut down version of pinnacles software that came with it. Very new to this and I am sure it could be a multitude of things causing this but can anyone point me in the right direction?.IF the problem lies with the fact that the pc is too low spec is there a pci card out there that will do all the donkey work and taken the strain of the cpu and wont break the bank as I know the dazzle is only an interface and does not render anything

Cheers
 
Yep, the PC will be a bit slow but is more than powerful enough to do video capture & editing. It'll take it's time, but will get there in the end :D

Pinnacle could be a lot to do with your problems. It is well known for being unstable. If you want to stick with this program then get onto their web site and make sure you have all the patches & updates for your version of Studio. This solves the problems for many users, but others just can't get it to run reliably so other software may be required. Other popular software is Adobe Premiere Elements, Ulead Video Studio, Sony Vegus Studio all available for a free 30 day trial via a download from the companies web sites. They cost around £40-£50 each so trying the Pinnacle first is probably a good idea.

You also state that you have nothing else running on the PC during the capture - well I bet there are loads of unwanted background programs running that you are probably unaware of. Make sure you disable internet connection, power save modes and screen savers. Also to stop all the unwanted background programs such as antivirus, firewall etc I use a free doenloadable program called 'EndItAll2' that I can e-mail to you if required, just let me have your e-mail address via PM.
Make sure you have plenty of spare disc space and that the disc is defragmented as this will affect performance. 1 hour of captured video will eat up around 14Gb of disc space, and you'll need more for editing and file conversion etc so I recommend you have at least 30Gb free for a 1 hour project. Also make sure that DMA is enable on the HDD.

Lets hope the above is of some help. Let us know how you get on.

Mark.
 
Cheers Mark will try some of the other video-editing software you mentioned :thumbsup:

Cubix
 
I use a 700Mhz PC with 192Mb of ram for my Dazzle and it only drops about 10 frames per every 1000 frames of video and you don't ever notice it because it only does it when there is a sudden change all over the image (such as a scene change).
I use VDUP for capture though which is fairly processor friendly although if it messes up it tends to just not go away no matter how much you click End Process Tree (similar fashion to most budget or free video capture software as it never seems to be designed to deal with capture device errors very well and will either freeze momentarily or freeze indefinatly even stopping your computer from shutting down at times). The friendliest to all processors for capture is probably Windows Movie Maker 1.0 but sadly it captures movie and audio then converts them into dog crap. :rolleyes:
I only ever capture for VCD anyway which tends to drop frames of it's own accord at times anyway ^_^
 
Movie Maker 2 (upgrade is part of XP SP2) is very good for basic capture & editing. It is just limited on what type of files it can output. If you save the project as an AVI file then it will be a 100% quality of the origional video. You can then load it into any DVD authoring program to create a good quality DVD/(S)VCD. Of course the best thing about it is that it is free - as long as you have Windows XP on your PC.

Mark.
 
Cheers GearGuy, just to clarify when I get the new camcorder which will have dv-out and I link it to the pc via the firewire cable again this will be processor/memory hungry because there is no dedicated pci card etc doing the transfer right?. So I suppose my question is if you have a fast enough pc and good software it is possible to transfer footage from your dv-out capable camcorder to your pc without droping any frames

Thanks
 
Frewire capture does not overly put stress on the PC's CPU. The main stress is on the HDD & IDE controller as all it is doing is writing a file to the disc at a high bit rate. The processor etc only works hard when converting the files for creating a DVD etc, but this can be left to run overnight so time is not too much of an issue.
All but the very oldest of PC's can cope with video capture without dropped frames if set up correctly.

Mark.
 
Don't forget the windows XP data buffers! Man, they sure slow things down.
I dropped 1000 frames in a benchmark test with them enabled on once pc and only 70 on another...
And th PC that dropped the most frames claimed to have an Ultra DMA Hard Drive :rotfl:
 
Thanks for that Mark, will give it a go.IF I need to rule out Xp's data buffers as the cause of my dropped frames where would I find the setting GearGuy?

Thanks
 
The option to diable them is in the capture software.
Use Virtual Dub! It lets you disable them although it may have different effects on different computers so I'm not sure if it will work for you!
 
Can you lads have a look at the attacthments and tell me what I might be doing wrong in Ulead. The error msg is what I am getting when I try to capture video from my canon UC-X15-Hi8 which is connected to the dvc-90.

Cheers
 

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