Page 1 of Mini-DV - Video capture problems

I have a Canon MV800i mini-dv camcorder. I am having trouble capturing video onto my PC. My spec is:
Athlon 3 GHz
628 Mb Ram
Maxtor HDD (with 37Gb free space)
Nvidia Geforce FX5900XT
Firewire card
Windows XP os

So, I would have thought that the PC is up to the task. The problem is that when I try to capture (either with Windows Movie Maker or Ulead Video Studio 7), it will get no more than a minute`s worth and then will drop frames or completely freeze up. I`ve tried de-fragging, closing down all anti-virus and firewall software but to no avail. It will seem to `lock up` completely; I try the Ctrl, Alt, Del and shut it down from there...but then find the system idle process is taking up 99% of the CPU and it just sits there, until I do a re-boot. I`ve read that it`s better to have 2 hard drives, or at least partition your drive...but that seems a lot of effort and possibly beyond my skills. I understand that, unless I re-format my HDD and do a new installation, that a new partition might cause me other problems.

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

Hi

Iam suprised you are having capture problems as i use only either sempron 2400/2600 and each has 1 gig of memory and both fx 5500 graphics cards.The hard drives 1/ has 120 gig internal plus external and the other a 160 gig internal only.Both can capture to the internal drive freeview recordings and have the antivirus and other software in the back ground with no problems and the same for playback.
Are you sure you have the latest driver for the graphic card loaded and any drivers for your other card uptodate.It may be the software you are using is not a go match ,i would try another and see what happens.I have also found on one machine that changing to the latest windows player made the system more stable so that may help.

bye

R.B

I have a brand new PC with 1 gig of RAM and a P4 processor . Windows movie maker wouldn`t capture at all.

so I used dvio

Worked like a charm.

Then I edit using virtualdub

Convert to MPEG 2 using TMPGEnc Plus

And author the DVD using TMPGEnc DVD Author

Job Done!



My DVD collection





JamesL

This item was edited on Monday, 20th March 2006, 17:53