Hi All,
I sincerely hope I can find a solution here to a problem that has me stumped. When capturing DV from a Sony DCR-TRV330E to my laptop via firewire, frames keep being dropped intermittently. The machine is a Dell Latitude E5420 with a 2.6GHz i5-2540M CPU, 4GB of RAM and is installed with Windows 7 32-bit SP1. I haven't been able to identify the 1394 chipset from Windows utilities or Dell documentation.
This is what I have tried to reduce or remove the problem:
This seems to occur in batches. There'd be periods where no frames get dropped, no matter what I throw at the system. Then there'd be periods where a frame gets dropped, every few minutes apart or sometimes closer.
I have noticed a couple of interesting things in this regard. The first, as mentioned above, is that errors seem to occur more regularly when the computer fan is running. The second is that the interval between frame drops is often close to multiples of minutes, or half-minutes even. This got me wondering whether some background task is regularly checking or doing something and tripping up the capture in the process. The third happened while watching Task Manager for this. Once I was able to catch a frame drop in progress, so to speak. As the frame drop occurred, all the processes then visible in the Task Manager list had their "Memory (Private Working Set)" adjusted?! All simultaneously! Strange but true.
What conclusions can I draw from this, if anything at all? What would be the next things to look at? Any other suggestions and help welcomed!
Thanks a lot,
Francois
I sincerely hope I can find a solution here to a problem that has me stumped. When capturing DV from a Sony DCR-TRV330E to my laptop via firewire, frames keep being dropped intermittently. The machine is a Dell Latitude E5420 with a 2.6GHz i5-2540M CPU, 4GB of RAM and is installed with Windows 7 32-bit SP1. I haven't been able to identify the 1394 chipset from Windows utilities or Dell documentation.
This is what I have tried to reduce or remove the problem:
- Put the DVCAM into camera mode; this produces a live feed for capturing which rules out tape errors
- Closed all unnecessary programs, including anti-virus
- Defragmented all drives
- Captured to a non-system drive
- Checked for latest Microsoft drivers (the E5420's 1394 adapter uses the generic Microsoft driver)
- Checked for latest Dell drivers
- Tried different capturing utilities
- Tried different firewire cables
- Retried with the machine at different power options (frame drops seem to occur more often when the computer fan is running)
- Disabled power management of the 1394 interface
- All remedies suggested at Windows 7 and Firewire problem, except for the UniBrain drivers
- All the other usual folk remedies for firewire-related capturing problems...
This seems to occur in batches. There'd be periods where no frames get dropped, no matter what I throw at the system. Then there'd be periods where a frame gets dropped, every few minutes apart or sometimes closer.
I have noticed a couple of interesting things in this regard. The first, as mentioned above, is that errors seem to occur more regularly when the computer fan is running. The second is that the interval between frame drops is often close to multiples of minutes, or half-minutes even. This got me wondering whether some background task is regularly checking or doing something and tripping up the capture in the process. The third happened while watching Task Manager for this. Once I was able to catch a frame drop in progress, so to speak. As the frame drop occurred, all the processes then visible in the Task Manager list had their "Memory (Private Working Set)" adjusted?! All simultaneously! Strange but true.
What conclusions can I draw from this, if anything at all? What would be the next things to look at? Any other suggestions and help welcomed!
Thanks a lot,
Francois