Is this dropped frames?

jbitakis · #1 (**permalink**) 08-09-2007, 08:16 AM

I just captured a few minutes from my dv camcorder to my pc and a their is a 10 second segment where it looks as though it is stop and go and slow motion. Are these dropped frames. How do I prevent this in the future? Also, I noticed that capturing video using windows movie maker does not give a good resolution compared with my ulead dvd software. So it seems best to capture with ulead and then import into windows movie maker if I want to use movie maker.
Thanks
James

LJR · #2 (**permalink**) 08-20-2007, 03:14 PM

Certainly sounds like dropped frames during capture. Does it happen at exactly the same point every time you try and capture as that would perhaps indicate it's more a problem with the source footage? Have you tried capturing in smaller segments to see if that resolves the problem? What is the spec of your PC? Do you have lots of free drive space and a nicely defragged drive to capture to (or better still, a dedicated scratch drive)? Are you using a dedicated firewire port (I know of problems with some people who capture through firewire ports that are part of their soundcard). Is the camcorder the only firewire device on that bus when you capture (i.e. do you have any external firewire drives connected at the same time)?

I assume that when you view the recorded footage through your camcorder view finder you don't see the dropped frames? You could set up the capturing software to stop automatically if it should detect a dropped frame during capture. At least you could then start your next capture a few seconds earlier than that point (instead of having to hunt and find all the time).