I must admit that I am a complete newcomer to this aspect of computng and I'm very much feeling my way in the dark. I read these columns advidly and my search has not revealed the cause of dropped frames in my captures. I suspect that a lot of the trouble may be my capture card which I believe is a Belkin affair which I bought for DV capturing and for that it works fine. Recently I came across a "you beaut" programme and device for capturing analogue (also Belkin) and it seem to be working OK until I noticed that in something like 1000 odd frames it had dropped 400 odd. The playback is therefore jerky, the picture quality is also somewhat suspect. Can this be overcome or can someone suggest a better setup that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Actually on a further search I did find some info on dropped frames and it looks as though my setup is indeed suspect. I have XP Pro with a slow cpu (Pentium PIII with 786meg ram) and I'm saving onto an NTFS formatted 160gig drive which is used exclusively for video work. Regards
Well your Dropped Frames Problem could be from a Number of Things... If you are useing one of those "Belkin Video Bus" USB Capture devices then I would say that 70% of your problem is that because USB Capture devices are Notorously Bad unless thay have Hardware Compression which the Belkin doesn"t have..... Also if you are Captureing to a compressed format like Mpeg then you will Drop Frames especially at High resolutions because you need a Pretty Fast PC to Capture to Compressed Formats Like Mpeg at High resolutions... You mught consider Upgradeing your PC if you Plan on doing any more Video stuff... You can upgrade your P-3 to a 3.0ghz P-4 (New CPU and Motherboard and Ram) for about $125 if you do it yourself and for another about $85 you could get a Pretty good Capture device(With Hardware Compression) and be ready to do anything Video related without Performance problems.... Cheers
Thanks for your reply... you have pretty much confirmed what I suspected my problem was. I rather hoped there was something I could do in the meantime (before upgrading the PC.) An upgrade is on the cards but it is someway down the track yet but a good capture card will be a priority. Thanks again and regards.
