So I just tried capturing a tape from my sony hdr-fx1 which I have hooked up through the component out on the camera to my HD monitor for viewing during capture.
From the point of view of the camera, the capture should have gone perfectly. It looks pristine a not one artifact for the entire 60 minutes.
The capture to cineform 3.3 results were horrible however and I could some input on where to start troubleshooting.
-About 10min into the scene captures all the files have the same thumbnail and size all of a sudden (187000KB) and files pervious to that are filled with artifacts.

Why didn't the capture process report and error and stop? It kept on for the entire tape and I ended up with 100s of these little files of nothing?

Is the sony fixing the artifacts on the fly or are they due to a flaw in the capture process? I mean they were horrible.

I am running a new Opteron 165 dual core overclocked to 2.1ghz which I was hoping would work but now I have to go back and recapture at 1.8 (regular speed) to see if that was it. Or is my memory settings.

Windows and premiere are otherwise running stable at this speed so there was no indication of instability.

I was really hoping I could overclock on capture, but I either need better memory or something else is up.
Is every artifact due to a memory glitch if they don't show up on screen durring the capture process?

1.65 opteron 939 socket dual core, 1gb ram, 7800 nvidia GT video, Cineform Aspect 3.3, Windows XP SP2. SATA Raid separate system and video storage.

Try using HDlink to determine where you might be getting errors. This sounds like dropped packets (small pieces of a compresed frame) on your FireWire bus, so you should see if you can capture without conversion (an HDLink feature.) If you can, then the FireWire connection and card is probably OK, if not you will need to resolve the FireWire/Hardware/driver issue(s.) Also try capturing to different disks (to see if you have disk to Firewire bus contention issue -- rare but it can happen.) Fortunately thousands of Aspect HD users are also using the FX1, so there will be a solution.

Good to know and what the heck are you doing up at this hour??
The AMD 939 motherboard I am using does not have on board firewire so I am using the port on an Audigy ZS 2 instead so it is possible I have to get a dedicated firewire card. My last capture of 30 minutes worked at stock speeds however there were some artifacts in each clip captured that did not show up on the monitor our from the camera during capture.
Any reason for me to upgrade to 3.4 during this time or should I wait till I get the kinks out?

No harm in the upgrade, but it won't help, that Audigy card is the very likely cause (their FireWire has been an issue in the past.) A generic $25 FireWire card should solve your problem.

P.S. And yes it is past my bed time :)

sorry to be so negative, but if we clobber this space it will become unreadable and uninteresting..

This seems very important to me, how would one know this was or was not a support issue and not a cineform setting issue? For all I knew the artifacts were due to the codec and some setting I had made.
Anyway I know what you mean about getting some upset mesages here, but when you are working on a weekend, one gets a little desparte sometimes.

The chance of not having some aspect of your system that is out of line with another part or software is way to high at this point in pc platform technology in my opinion. Why should my 1394 be any different than anoter 1394? That is why it is an IEEE standard so that we users don't have to deal with stuff. But that, it turns out is not the way it is.

I just want to edit, not make sure my chipset, pci slots, type of ram, audio card, bios and firmware are all up snuff just so I can capture video? That is a lot to ask of a regular user of a pc I think. Not to rant :) I know I am going above and beyond what most users do... but to find that my firewire is problem at 11pm on saturday can be a little frustrating especially if there is no way to tell if the the firewire is bad since I can hook up hard drives to it and it works fine in every other way.

Hi,

Could the overclocking have raised the PCI bus frequency and maybe caused the audigy card to be unstable?

Mick Guzauski

Overclocked to 231mhz now appears to be working with new adaptec 1394 pci card just installed tonight. So far so good and now artifact free so far.
Looks like the audigy 2 zs port sucks - don't use it.