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dropped frames & transfer problems
I have Vegas movie studio 6 and very regulary experience problems while transfering video from my 2 year old JVC GR-D290U video camera. I am using fire wire and it is being transfered to an external hard drive.
It usually begins ok, but I cannot get through an entire tape without it either dropping frams (usually not too many actually) or totally loosing ‘communication’ between the software and machine. It happens so many times that I give up and rewind a little, cycle the power and start over from where I left off.
Is this a software problem, video camera problem? Is this normal?
It is very frustrating to say the least. I don’t have professional equipment, but it is new enough that this should work. Fortunately this is just video for the grandparents, so editing glitches don’t really matter.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Rodney
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3 Replies
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Dropped frames during capture are not “normal”. In seven years, I’ve only experienced dropped frames once and that was just recently when I tried capturing to a new 500GB HDD (still haven’t fixed that problem yet!) I’ve never had a camera stop talking to a computer part way through a capture…
Initial thought – is the external HDD connected via Firewire? I’ve never used them myself but it’s possible that your firewire card can’t handle a camera AND a hard drive at the same time (even though it’s got more than one port…)
I’d start doing a bit of troubleshooting.
a) Does the external hard drive need defragmenting?
b) If you have two or more internal hard drives, try capturing to an internal hard drive (not your C: drive)
c) If the computer is connected to a network
i) disable the network
ii) shut down any email programs that might be checking servers for email periodically
iii) disable any “phone home” options in other software packages (e.g. Norton anti-virus phones home every 15 minutes(I think) by default to check for s/w and virus signature file updates.)
iv) disable your anti-virus auto-protect options temporarily (remember to re-enable before you reconnect to network!)The solution to your problem might not be in the above suggestions, but they’re definitely something worth trying (if you haven’t already) until people with experience using your particular set-up chime in… And I’d defintely try all of the above before suspecting a sick firewire card or something.
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Thank you, I will try those and get back to you.
I will add this, I am using a laptop. From the camera comes firewire, and then I selected my external HD for where to put the transfered video via USB2.
Rodney
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Well it turns out it was just a bad cable. Go figure. I set the camera up as a webcam to see if it would loose communication with the computer and it did. Then I tried another cable and it worked flawlessly.
One note, I was using a Belkin cable, 4 pin to 6 pin with a 6 pin to 4 pin adapter (my computer and camera both us a 4 pin firewire). So perhaps it was the cable or the adapter, not sure. I’m just happy the new cable works.
Also, the antivirus ‘update’ in the middle of capturing and it did cause me to loose many frames, so I had to start over.
Thanks for the tips.
Rodney
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