I have a sony vaio as well, and if you use dvgate to capture, then you should be able to go in and choose a setting that says no compression on import. this should solve your crappy capture problems!

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Mac G5 workstation with 4 gigs of ram, 4x250 gig drives in raid 5. High availability cluster server running centos for a server. 2xCanon GL2 cameras.

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