At work we are trying to capture analog video to the computer to make streaming videos later. This includes live cameras and sometimes playback of a vcr. Unfortuantely from what Ive read the equipment we have is..well... less than desirable by reviews. Im hoping someone can help me get this thing working. The problem is that after 45 minutes to an hour the audio becomes out of sync. a two hour recording sometimes results in about 4 dropped frames. so by the end of the video it can be a couple of seconds out of sync. I am trying to figure out if the issue is the application or the hardware. unfortunately being a work machine and a lenovo all in one unit, there is no ability to add cards so this must be done via usb. Ideally I would like to get what i have working.But if something has to be replaced I don't think my budget is going to be real big. What were using is Pinnacle studio 14 with the 510-USB capture device. the source is composite so DV isn't an option. The recording settings are mpeg-2 at 3Mbit capturing to a devoted hard disk. At this setting it drops frames and fall out of sync sometimes, however still enough to be a burden. If I drop it down to 2mbit it works perfectly but the quality suffers so much that it is unusable. The web guide says that its a bandwidth issue but there are no real good tips on how to insure there is enough bandwidth. Anti Virus is off, there are no other applications running at the same time and the only other usb devices are the keyboard and mouse. the computer is: 2.93 core 2 duo 2 gig ddr2 windows 7 64bit I have disabled things like the wifi, web cam and unused USB ports. are there any suggestions on how to make sure the system gives enough bandwidth? other ideas? As for alternatives... 1)Does anyone know of any other software that is compatible with the pinnacle 510-usb composite? (other programs such as adobe premier wont even recognize it.) 2)recommendations for any other better usb hardware that could replace the 510-usb inexpensively? 3)anyone ever added new capture codecs to pinnacle studio? if so, how can i add more capture options to try and wield better results? Any help and suggestions are most appreciated.
Make sure the capture drive is defragged as much as possible. Is the mpeg encoding done by HW acceleration (by the capture device) or is it done in the SW (the main CPU) ? Have you tried capturing in HuffyUV avi? It's designed to be fast and resource-light. (but it uses quite a bit of disk space) If you capture to something like HuffyUV, you can edit and convert to your target format when you're ready.
I have sort of fiddled with both. I try to use hardware acceleration as a default. But I am not sure what is better. I havent heard of Huffy before. So ill certainly check that out. I need to have the raw file no bigger than about 5 gigs for 4 hours. I have to pull a few files a day off the computer to the editor over the network for production.
HW acceleration done in the capture device itself, relieves the main CPU of the load - so in theory less chance of dropped frames. 5 GB's is not a lot of space for the raw capture .
