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

USB, 1 or 2, is not fast enough for video. Firewire is the best plug-in digital video interface, it's designed to keep up with video.

If you must convert analog to digital, use a PCI bus video card that has hardware compression. Software compression can't keep up with video. Also hard drives will have trouble keeping up. RAID arrays may be fast enough for real time captures, but they have their own drawbacks.


The Math (tm)- 720x576 at 25 fps worst case (8 bit RGB) may need as much as 31 megabytes per second to avoid dropping frames. Hard disk drives can easily have a write rate below this. DV compression reduces the video data rate to about 6 megabytes per second, a rate most hard drives can keep up with.

A Panasonic Mini-DV camcorder with analog pass-through combined with Firewire is sometimes what a friend of mine uses for this in his video business. It also does jitter filtering at the same time.

MPEG2 compression at 9 Mb/S will only need about 1.5 Megabytes per second. This is why I use a Hauppauge PVR-250 PCI bus card for all analog conversion.

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Fav quote - "Experience is whatcha don't get 'till ya don't need it no more."

System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

I'm not familiar with the Hauppauge PVR-250. Would one of the Pinnacle cards work for the hardware compression? So the USB Dazzle 90, effectively doesn't work? Why does Pinnacle sell a product that can't do the job? That $100 dollars down the drain. I'm looking at one of the Raptor SATA hard drives - 10,000 RPM, think that would work?
Thanks for your assistance.

the dazzel 90 does do the job but you can get much better results from a device that does not require a USB port. these products are designed for people who buy off the shelf PCs and cannot open their PC due to warenty. the best thing is the hauppage card as surgested as it is in a PCI slot which is a tone faster than USB

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K0mat0ast

K0mat0ast on myspace

Agree with komatoast, USB devices are crap and will never get the job done. USB is simply not fast enough for DV.

Thanks guys. So...with the Hauppauge PVR-250 I can use any editing software? This kinda a beginner system for my sister; I don't want to go too high-end unless she really gets into it. I was considering a hw/ws solution like Pinnacle. Would Pinnacle a good choice?

Thanks again.

The PVR 250 produces MPEG-2 interlaced video with MPEG1/Level2 compressed audio (sometimes called MP2 aufio). Most editors can import this sort of file. Since your input is analog, presumably from tape, the quality should be fine. I've always found it so. The PVR-250 does come with a simple 'cuts only' editor that allows cutting out unwanted bits. I can't recommend it for anything serious.

Of course a good mini-DV camera will produce higher quality video. My dinky Panasonic GS9 beats the pants off my Canon A70. But I can only see that when I use my PC to view the recordings. Played back on my TV, they look identical.

__________________
Fav quote - "Experience is whatcha don't get 'till ya don't need it no more."

System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

Speaking about the Pinnacle solutions, I use the Pinnacle AV/DV 9 which is a capture card with Firewire, S-Video and Composite inputs and outputs, bundled with Pinnacle Studio 9.4.3 and HFX 5.5, but also works perfectly with any other NLE (Avid, Media Studio, Vegas, anything). So yes it might be a good investment.

Thank you all for your insight. Its appreciated.