I haven't cracked my case open to see for sure, but when I pull from my GL2 to my 2nd hard drive (which is defragmented and has plenty of space) I get frame drops after a few minutes.

Would the most likely reason for this be performance on that drive? I'm not sure if it's a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive. I just grabbed it from a machine that was lying around. Must I have a 7200 rpm drive to get results from Vegas?

I'm running Win2k Pro and have 512MB RAM. If I pull clips to the 1st drive it's fine but I've only got a few gigs free on that drive.

Thanks,
Kevin

Not all 5400 rpm drives (especially the older ones) can handle the
load indeed. But that doesn't have to be the case. It all depends
on the drive. Do you have DMA turned on with that drive? (not
always the case if you add a "new" one). Is there any other
device on the cable that runs from the motherboard to the drive?
If so, it might not be able to run at full speed.

What does your bios say about the drive when your system boots
(ie, (U)DMA, PIO etc.)?

Sounds like a system configuration error. I would check the DMA setting for that drive first. Rob gives you many good suggestions.

Okay... sorry for the delay, I was visiting the sun in Myrtle.

On boot for the second drive I see:

LBA, ATA66, 20526MB, S.M.A.R.T. disabled. Nothing denoting DMA or PIO stuff. I'll have to jump into the bios and see what I see.

Does it matter that Vegas is installed on the other drive and I'm pulling the video to this one?

It doesn't really matter which drive Vegas is installed on. Generally speaking, it should be installed on the system drive.

The DMA setting is in the Device Manager. Depending on the OS you either have to look at the controller card OR the hard drive. Look at both places and verify DMA is on.

<<<-- Originally posted by Edward Troxel : The DMA setting is in the Device Manager. Depending on the OS you either have to look at the controller card OR the hard drive. Look at both places and verify DMA is on. -->>>

I'm on Win2kPro. In the device manager when I bring the properties of the IBM drive up the only configurable switch I see is Write Cache which is currently enabled.

I also looked at the Disk Manager and don't see DMA options listed. I'm going to reboot right now and see what's to see in the bios. I forgot to do it this time :)

Be right back...

Okay... I'm a moron.. and to top it off, I got my start as a tech. Now I'm a net admin so I guess the details of systems poored out of my head.

Anyhow, upon looking at the primary channel of the IDE controller for the secondary device on the Advanced tab I see:

Device type: Auto Detection
Transfer Mode: DMA if avail
Current Mode: Ultra DMA Mode

So this is a strange deal. Should I switch it to PIO? Are there any tweaks within Vegas that might help?

And to answer Rob's earlier question this is the 2nd drive on the primary IDE channel. The other device being the system drive.

Thanks,
Kevin

PIO mode is craptacular. Avoid it at all costs.

NO, LEAVE it on DMA. However, that rules that out from being the problem. Frequently, the DMA issue IS the problem. In your case, it appears to go deeper. Now you'll have to determine what other system pieces may be slowing you down. Unfortunately, there's a wide variety of things that could cause that.

And to answer Rob's earlier question this is the 2nd drive on the primary IDE channel. The other device being the system drive.

For optimum results, you should not have your capture drive on the same channel with your system drive. Move it to the 2nd IDE channel. Generally what I have found is 1st IDE channel: System drive is master, DVD-rom is slave. 2nd IDE channel: Capture drive is master, DVD-writer is slave.

Thanks Guy... I'll try this tonight.

Thanks alot! That seems to have solved the problem. I pulled a full tape last night with zero drops.

Kevin,
That's great. Glad it worked out for you. Now, going forward, keep the capture drive as empty and defragmented as possible or it will slow down and you'll drop frames again.

Will do, Guy. Hey, do you let Vegas cut the incoming fed clips to the CD-ROM margin? I didn't notice that I hadn't unchecked that and am wondering if it's a good idea just for the sake of an error happening when I'm not watching.

I'm assuming that there's no frame loss at the cut point and that clipping them together in a prject is easy. Do any of you allow it to gut at any point? If so, why?

Thanks!

-Kevin

Hey, do you let Vegas cut the incoming fed clips to the CD-ROM margin?

I'm not sure what you mean here, Kevin. Generally, I let Vegas detect clips automatically. If you have a continuous stream, you can break it up by time or capture it fully then later split it up on the timeline. If you are referring to the Windows FAT32 file size limit, I use XP so don't have to worry about it. However, Vegas should split the file without dropping frames.

I have continuous video on my tapes (live concerts). I left the settings alone and Vegas split it at the 655MB mark (roughly a 74 minute CD).

So I guess what you're saying is that it isn't neccessary. I'm running Win2K on NTFS so the 2G limit isn't an issue.

Thanks,

That's outside my experience, Kevin. I've never captured a stream that large. Maybe someone else can weight in.

I do NOT let Vegas Capture break my clips unless *I* want them broken. When I capture normally, I capture in one great big clip. If, for some reason I want it broken on scenes, I'll turn on that option but usually have it off. In fact, I usually use batch capture. Personally, I would NOT have vidcap automatically split at CD size increments.

Okay... fair enough. I thought it odd that it had defaulted to that size. Since there's no benefit to that setting, I'll uncheck it.

Thanks for everyone's help,
Kevin

That setting should not have been on by default. However, there may be other settings you DO want to change. Take a look at the setting info in the first few issues of the Tips, Tricks, and Scripts Newsletter (http://www.jetdv.com/tts)

The odd thing is that when I turned it off I got frame drops again. I threw a different hard drive in (7200rpm 160Gig) and have now pulled two tapes without issue. I'm thinking that the IBM drive was partially to blame.

Or misconfigured and therefore having to run more slowly. Maybe the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumber was in the wrong place on the first drive and the second one has it in the correct place?

No... the settings were the same. I put this new drive in the same place on the chain set the same way. Master on the secondary IDE channel. They were both using DMA.

The IBM is an older drive with a smaller cache and only 5400 rpm. I'm not sure what it was, but it's working now.

Thanks,
Kevin