Hello,

I'm fairly new to video editing on computers, so please bare with me if I ask any dopey questions. But I guess we all have to start somewhere.

Anyway, I recently had a firewire 1394 installed into my computer. I'm running Windows 98 second edition. I also had a new hard drive installed to basically work as storage space for my videos.

However I did not have a new processor put in, which is where I think my problems lie.

Upon opening Pinnacle's Studio version 9 (the trial version) I tried to capture film. Unfortunately a message popped up onto screen saying that my data rate wasn't good enough; it needed to be 4444kb/s I think.

I'm guessing this means I need a quick processor? As in, data rate = processing power?

Anyhow, I installed virtualdub, recommended to me by someone, and I managed to capture some video on there. Albeit I had no sound..but that is another set of questions I shall ask another time. Also when I began capturing it commented that it could not recognise the format and wouldn't preview.

It was captured at a rate of 1500kb/s and it was kinda choppy. It was caputed as a pretty big .avi file. I played it through windows media file and I could watch it okay, although, like I said, it was a bit choppy.

I then went to try and open it in virtual dub, but it said it did not have the right files to view it.

So does anyone know why it didn't recognise the nonRGB format or whatever at the start? And does anyone know why I can't play it?

Then, to finish it off I went into pinnacle to use the editing suite and everytime I open up the .avi file to edit it the software crashes and I have to close it down.

Anyone got any idea why?

Many thanks to those that reply. And also many thanks to those who even read this.

Hi, the processor will certainly play a part, but i'm suspecting it might be the hard disc that's not fast enough

What is:

- Your processor
- Your hard disc
- The amount of RAM you have in your PC

?

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Hard disk: 9.5gb, 4.1g free. That's what I am operating on.
Hard disk that I am saving video onto: 140gb.

RAM: 640.

Not entirely sure how to figure out my processing power :-|

Defrag your drive.

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640MB RAM, plenty there, ok, go to:

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

download CPU-Z, run it and what does it say under the CPU section (name and core speed most important), but also, under the mainboard tab, what make and model your motherboard is.

But yeah, like Marc said, defragment your drive. It usually helps.

Ooh yes. This certainly sounds like a hard drive throughput issue. Some other things you may want to try:

- ensure the drive you are capturing to is on its own IDE cable (i.e. any secondary devices like CD and DVD drives are on a second IDE cable)
- defrag (as mentioned)
- preferably have a minimum of two hard drives; one for your programs and one solely dedicated to capturing and rendering
- if purchasing a hard drive get the highest spin speed, with lowest seek time, and most cache you can afford. This is even more important than the the overall capacity in my opinion (although that is obviously a consideration too).
- make sure when you are capturing or doing anything labour intensive that you stop all other non-essential applications. Look for a program on the Net called EndItAll

__________________
Lloyd

That's my opinion. If you don't like it I have others

System: Apple Macbook Pro 17, and an external Freecom 500GB eSATA drive.
Software: Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, DVD Studio Pro 4, Compressor 3), Sonicfire Pro 4.5
Favourite Resources: Findsounds.com, Free DVD menus, Ken Stone's FCP Page, Wikivid

if it's 98, i'm wagering that dma ain't enabled.

but really, if you're doing video stuff, therefore working with big files, get xp or 2k on there asap, the biggest file you can have with 98 is 4GB, a third of the size of a dv tape, and less than an image of a full dvd.

are you sure that hard drive is 140GB, by the way? I thought they jumped from 120 to 160GB. I've certainly never seen a 140GB one.

That aside, if it's up in the >100GB range, it'll certainly be fast enough to read/write at well above the data rates needed for DV, so it's an OS/driver issue. Have you installed the motherboard/ide drivers?

Thanks for the replies guys.

Name: AMD Duron
Core Speed: 897 MH

So the general suggestions are basically: Get Windows XP and defrag my computer?

Thanks again, your help is so much appreciated.

First, i'd go download sisoft sandra, and check that your machine is performing as it should. It'll tell you if you need to enable dma or anything.

Then, defrag. Then, go for xp. If you can, i'd fire in a faster processor. If your motherboard will take it. The duron is pretty slow.

:: edit - fixed dodgy speelung ::