I hope this is the right thread for these questions...

My System: Athlon 3200 XP with 1 GB of RAM, a 40GB EIDE HDD for Windows XP Home Edition and an 80 GB EIDE HDD for video editing work. Video card is an nVidia 5900 w/ 128MB. I have a Pinnacle systems Dazzle 90 (NTSC), the software is Studio v9 SE. The Dazzle 90 connects to the PC via USB 2.0 connection. All video capturing right now is from an analog camcorder.

The problem: Capturing from the camcorder drops a great deal of frames as it tries to write to the HDD. I am assumng the dedicated 80GB HDD cannot write fast enough, its interface is EIDE. I need to resolve this so I'm not dropping frames in the transfer. Pinnacle didn't mention any particular HDD xfer rates in their marketing blurb on the product box, however the documentation suggests SCSI drives.

Questions:
- Can I get the performance I need to write to the disk with the EIDE interface?
- Would I get better performance from a non-USB Pinnacle capture board? That is, get a Pinnacle capture board installed instead of using the Dazzle 90 USB device.
- Is SCSI the only way to go? Would two Serial ATA (SATA) HDDs in a RAID-0 configuration give me the write performance I need? SCSI is really expensive.
- Pinnacle warned in the documentation about using HDDs that are too big. What maximum sizes should I be looking at? Its hard to find smaller drives, and if two drives are setup in a RAID-0 config, then thats a larger disk to work with - is that going to be too big?

I would appreciate anyones guidance on these issues. Thank You.

John

I haven't used the Dazzle90, but as it is a USB device I wouldn't use it. I capture from analogue tape aswell but I have an inbuilt composite and S-Video capture card, don't know what make it is, as it wasn't listed on the outside of the box the computer came in. I just pulled down a flap on the front and there it was (happy days). The reason you are losing frames might be because the hard disks are too slow, in other words they can sustain 3.6Mb/s that is needed to change analogue video into digital video. Two things are actually happening, you are recording video and changing it from analogue to digital and the HDD can't keep up. Other factors such as the Front Side Bus speed (needs to be 800Mhz) also affects the ability or in your case inability to record steady video without dropping frames. You could try changing the capture settings in your software to see if the helps. I would recommed Serial ATA drives for capture, and I have a 250GB drive, so size doesn't come into it.

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

I haven't used the Dazzle90, but as it is a USB device I wouldn't use it. I capture from analogue tape aswell but I have an inbuilt composite and S-Video capture card, don't know what make it is, as it wasn't listed on the outside of the box the computer came in. I just pulled down a flap on the front and there it was (happy days). The reason you are losing frames might be because the hard disks are too slow, in other words they can't sustain 3.6Mb/s that is needed to change analogue video into digital video. Two things are actually happening, you are recording video and changing it from analogue to digital and the HDD can't keep up. Other factors such as the Front Side Bus speed (needs to be 800Mhz) also affects the ability or in your case inability to record steady video without dropping frames. You could try changing the capture settings in your software to see if the helps. I would recommed Serial ATA drives for capture, and I have a 250GB drive, so size doesn't come into it.

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

Whoops, I've got a bit of an itchy trigger finger tonight... read the second post instead.

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

Thanks NikoSony. I'm considering going to an internal capture card. The CPU I've got is an AMD Athlon 3200 XP, I believe that is the fastest most powerful 32-bit CPU that AMD makes. It is a 400 MHz FSB - I hadn't read anything about needing an 800 MHz FSB. I'm probably going to go with (2) SATA HDDs in a RAID 0 configuration. I take it the SATA configuration works for you?

Wouldn't you need a faster CPU speed, standard computers these days have 2.50 GHz at least If your programs lagging you need more speed on that and also more RAM?

I've never tried to do any video editing with a computer running at 400 MHz FSB, I've stuck with 800Mhz bus speed and that does the job for me in one to two hours rather than five or six or even longer going by some posts I've read on here. Yes, the SATA is fine, again I haven't set up a RAID but as I can get away with SATA running at 7200rpm, why fix what's not broken. A thing I noticed about Adobe software is (correct me if I'm wrong) but it seems to be more Intel orientated, it probably works fine with AMD processors but some of the features Premiere asks for are only available using an Intel chipset.

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