not capturing

[bfisher]

Call me dumb, but dumber would not be asking this dumb question. First I'd like to explain that I'm completely new to underwater video. Video in general to be truthful. Never had a camsorder before.

The camcorder is a Sony HC7. The software is Power Director V6. It has taken me several days just to figure out how to download (capture) the video to my computer, but at least it's a start.

My question concerns what I want to call skipping. When capturing in HD the video seems to skip frames or whatever you want to call it. It just stops for a second and then starts again. If you've experienced this then you know what I'm talkng about. Now the question is???--- what causes this? Not enough computer? Not enough Ram?
It doesn't do this when capturing in standard definiton mode.

I know I'm working with less than recommended processor and ram, but I need to know what causes what when this stuff happens.

 

[fppf]

It could be many things.
The CPU may be hammered and just can't compress the frame rate coming in.
The GPU may not be able to handle the stream.
The Hard drive access may not be fast enough to handle the stream.

For video I built a dual CPU with dual core chips, 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB RAID 0 SATA array for storage. Top that off with a good ATI of Nivda card and a good 1394 port.

How are you doing the capture, digital or an analog input?

 

[diversteve]

My guess without seeing it would be processor or HD speed. You want to exceed the minimum processor recommendation by whatever you can afford and at a minimum probably have a 7200RPM drive with a healthy buffer.

I don't know Power Director but when I used another inexpensive NLE (Pinnacle) processor speed was my problem.

Does the s/w have a hardware profiler? It should tell you what it doesn't like.

It likely works in SD since the hardware requirements are much lower.

Are you doing Firewire capture? You should since USB capture can be interrupted if you have another active USB device.

But it's likely you just don't have a fast enough processor and enough memory.

 

[bfisher]

You guys are good. Now I'm pretty well convinced I just don't have enough computer--processor and memory. Just pulling from my memory I recall that Power Director is like a lot of the newer softwares. To do HD it needs at least a 2.8GB processor whereas mine is 2.16GB. They recommend at least 1GB ofRam and I have 512GB. In other words, you guys have just reinforced what I thought.

As I said, it downloads OK when I set the camcorder to proceed in SD mode. Guess I'll need to do some homework and see whether to upgrade this PC or just get a really big one to do the video work. I'm thinking maybe a 3.2 processor, 4GB of ram and 1000GB hardrive.

Oh, I was connected via Fireware, 4 pin to a 6 pin 1394 plug.

I'm not in too big a hurry right now to have HD. Just curious as to what to do, which has been pretty well answered here. What I do need is to get to editing something (anything) to figure out how to edit and how to use my present software.

I thank you guys very much. With such a knowledge base here I know I'll be back.

 

[fppf]

I would really look at getting a RAID array for speed. By doing a RAID array you can double the access speed of your hard drive.

Out of all the things I played with that was the most noticable speed increase.

You need everything else first of course.

 

[ScubaBob92651]

RAID is nice, but really not necessary for HDV capture. Where you really benefit from RAID is during file copies and re-encoding files. Of course, I'm referring to the striping variety of RAID (0,5,10).

Having a dedicated video drive (seperate from the hard drive with the OS and application software), is very helpful, especially on lower end editing rigs.

You say you are using a 2.16Ghz processor, is this an iMac or MacBook Pro? If so, this article may interest you.

Definately the additional RAM would help, having a dedicated hard drive for video files - and possibly looking into (read: try demo versions) an editing program that using an intermediate codec instead of editing raw .m2t files.