I've tried several programs to record to my harddrive in MPEG format to save space as the tape has some 60mins of film.

The camera "Sony Handycam", using a IEEE 1394 card and tried Pinnacle, Unlead video capture and Winavi, Win XP and 1.5G Ram. I can only select 25frames/sec for PAL.

The problem is when you watch the preview or playback the film is jumpy no matter whether you save in AVI or MPEG, yet the Camera preview is nice and smoothe.

I have a tape which has smoe 60mins of film and if I save this to my harddrive in AVI format I won't have enough space.

Any clues or what am I doing wrong.

How big is your hard drive? Are you using a laptop or a desktop PC? Do you really need to capture the entire 60 minutes of tape all in one go? It would be far better to capture 4 fifteen minute sequences and edit them separately with a view to joining them together later if need be. Personally, I would baulk at the thought of having to scroll back and forth in the timeline trying to find a particular scene in a 60 minute sequence. Also, depending on what software you are going to use, it may carry out read/write speed tests at set intervals and this will slow down the capture process which may lead to dropped or missing frames. If you live in the UK or Ireland or Australia then PAL is the correct format and 25 fps is also correct. The only other option is NTSC if you are living in America at nearly 30 fps. I can't remember the name of the last video editor I saw the French format SECAM on.

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I'm using a DeskTop PC with Win XP and SP2, 5G to spare on the Harddrive with a 2.17Ghz CPU, 1.5G Ram and located in the UK.

The 60 min tape/film is of a show my daughter appeared in.

The software I've tried is Pinnacle V10, Winavi and Ulead video capture, but with either or any other software the results are the same.

When watching the preview or replay in any of the above programs, it does not appear smooth running where it appears to jump to catch up with itself then run normal for a second or two and jump again to catch up.

It has been suggested that my graphics card may not have enough memory with 32Mb to cope with preview or playback, and I should use at least 128Mb.

Any thoughts on this???

You've only got 5GB of space remaining on your hard disk? That is too small to capture a 60 minute tape, that's if you are still intending to go that way. Five minutes of video will require just over 1GB of hard disk storage space at DV quality admittedly, but it defeats the purpose if you have a precious recording and then you have to use extreme compression to fit it all in. The picture quality will be noticably worse. You might want to think about uninstalling some applications or files off the hard disk or perhaps think about purchasing a second internal hard disk just for your video projects. In some video editors the default playback quality is set to less than perfect and so will look jagged and will give jerky playback. Try to find a playback preview setting in the software and see if it is set either at a figure below 100% or Draft or Medium rather than High. When was the last time you defragmented your hard disk? If you haven't done so in a while do it now. Also disable screensavers and antivirus software and any scheduled tasks during capture.

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Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...