USB 2 or Firewire for capturing of camcorder?

Are you capturing in AVI?
Are your hard drives set to UDMA mode?
What are your PC specs?

 

You need sufficient transfer rate from your harddrive. One should always use dedicated drive for video capturing/editing.
Dropped frames occure when your computer lacks performance.

 

I am capturing in AVI.
UDMA? Not quite sure although BIOS says UDMA mode 5 for both drives so I'm guessing so.
I am using the Maxtor drive for capture and editing.

P4 2.4Ghz
256MB DDR
40GB Maxtor
80GB WDC
Geforce FX 5200
Pioneer DVR-A04

 

Is the Maxtor 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm drive?
Specsm are Ok, more RAM thou would not be bad thing.
What Os you are running and format of drive system (NTFS/FAT/FAT32)?
You should defrag or better format your capture drive and test again.
Also you should check if you have some software running which takes lot of prosestime or maybe you have some virus or something.

 

I agree specs look fine, although another 256MB of RAM wouldn't go amiss.

If you have AV running you could turn that off while you capture, in fact turn everything else off while you do it.

Check in hardware manager under IDE controller that the channels are running on DMA and not PIO.

 

OS-Windows XP Home
Drive format-NTFS
Both hard drives are 7200 rpm
I have EVERYTHING turned off when capturing.

Malum,
Transfer Mode - DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode - PIO
It won't let me change current. Any ideas?

 

XP will switch to PIO mode after 6 or 8 errors in DMA mode, you cannot switch back.

Uninstall the IDE controllers from the device manager then reboot, at which point they will be reinstalled.
They should now be in DMA mode and if they are not you should be able to change them

 

My computer wouldn't reboot after uninstalling drivers.

 

You mean it now doesn't work?

 

No, it works fine, I rebooted with last working settings. I would just like to know if there is something else I can try.

 

Uninstalling the IDE controllers should cause no problems with boot up at all. I've done it countless times on many diferrent machines.

There is a reisrty tweak to do the same, but you'll have to search for it yourself. I'm off home for the weekend

 

I rolled back my driver and rebooted and it worked fine. My video capture works great now. Thanks a lot.

 

I would just like to add some general comments,

When using Fire wire the word 'capture' is a bit decptive, as you are not actually capturing video as you would with an analouge source your are in fact streaming/transmitting the raw DV data from the tape to the harddrive so the data on the tape should ne identical to the data on the harddrive, so people complaining about reduction of quality reduction should not be an issue, but the picture may look different becacuse the video decoders as used by your MiniDV may be better than your PC setup, also use a decent software video player toview your video such as Video Lan , as Windows media player is'nt the best player.

And USB 2 has about the same data rate as Fire wire namely 400 mbps ie 50MB a sec, however firewire is more supported as its been around longer.

 

shorty2k is absolutely correct.

But finally, is FirwWire going to work with the Panasonic DS60? The person who started the thread has a DS65, so I think if it is working fine with that person it should with mine too. Anyone knows please?

Thank You.

 

If the camera has a firewire port then firewire is going to work. It would be a bit redundant otherwise