allright in my other thread I mentioned that I was building a new pc just for capturing using aspect hd. so after fighting with it most of the night, I gave up to try again this morning. so I have my main editing machine that I also was doing my capturing from my sony HC3. it works great but obviously steals my pc for hours on end.

so I built another pc, set it all up and it runs great:

asus p5wdg2-ws mb
intel pentiun D 950 (dual core 3.4ghz)
2gig ddr2 corsair ram
300gig western digital (boot)
2x500gig western digital (raid 0 data capture
asus geforce 7800 pci-e

installed pp2 on it and then the latest trial of aspect, so opened hdlink set the captures to go into my raid array (left everything else alone) and hit start. it acts like it's capturing but the cpu usage on both cores stays about 1-2%. I hit stop and it gives the encoding box but nothing happens. it just stay locked up and i have to end task. the raid array is fine being that Ive moved data in and out of it and it smokes. uninstalled/reinstalled pp2 and aspect to no avail. so hooked my cam back up to my main rig opened hdlink hit start and runs with no probs. btw setting are the same for both hdlinks.

so, to further test I decided to use my gaming rig to test out the setup. FX-60 with dual raptors (boot) and 2 seagate 500 (raid 0 storage). so it's actually a little better than my new capture pc. installed pp2, installed trial aspect and it does the exact same damn thing. both boards have built in firewire plugs and I have an adaptec pci firewire that I've tried in both as well (both these pc's have 2gig pc800 ddr2).

the only difference is that on these 2 is the I've used the trial version of aspect and obviously my main pc has the registered version. I'm not buying another copy of aspect till I see that this works. I thought trial version is fully functional for like 2 weeks.

so anyway to restate the original problem, aspect sees my cam fine and when I click start it goes. but it's not actually capturing anything that I see and locks when I hit stop. so can anyone tell me what to do w/o having to post on cineforms tech site and have to wait 2 days to hear back.

Do some tests, as support will ask that of you. Does capturing to M2T only work? If so, does conversion of an M2T work? If these two elements work alone, you likely have a correct installation. Then on a fast-ish PC (doesn't need to be top end, a fast P4 is fine) the automatic conversion should work. You likely have an installation issue.

thanks for such a quick reponse, gonna test it right now and report back

well worked on it most of the day yesterday and basically learned that I have a 50/50 shot on whether aspect works or not. I have the asus ai prog running so I can instantly tell whether it's gonna work or not. so I open hdlink, hit start and watch my cpu utilization. if it's gonna work then my cpu shoots up to 90% to 98% (on both cores) if it doesnt then the cpu stays at 1% to 3%. if the latter, I have to end task (cause it's locked up), reboot and try again. now if it shoots up to the 90's then It's working but when the tape stops it takes forever to finish encoding. both tapes last night took over an hour to finish encoding so I could move the data to my main editing rig. I have one right now that the tape has finished playing, over 30min ago and the final rendering process is at 4 bars (25% done). looks like final encoding process could be 2 hours for this tape. you cant tell me that this cpu is that much slower than my core 2 duo (which usually does this part in minutes). something has to not be set right. btw I tested rendering/encoding several different size clips in several different programs last night. while it did take longer to render/encode these files than on my core 2 duo it wasnt nearly enough difference for me to say that the cpu is what's causing my problems here. only hdlink seems to really be dragging and not always working correctly here.

ps..I'm encoding to cineform avi's

File a trouble ticket as that behavior is not normal. A dual core Intel proc is effectively real-time for transcoding (when you're not scaling.)

I have also noticed some huge capture issues in cineform Hdlink and in Premiere pro 2.0 capture sessions.

First off, when I hit capture in HDlink, it freezes up the old comp, and in premiere, it works abnout 80% of the time, but when it hits the end of a tape. it says no frames captured, so I need to hit stop like 3 frames before ther tape ends. It also plows right through my batch-capture out points...

I have a PC with Aspect 4.2.7 and Premiere Pro 2.0

Run a core 2 duo E6600 at 2.4 GHZ, 2 GB 800mhz ram, dual linked nvidia 7600GT cards.

i just posted this in the open discusion forum:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=83340

anyone have any input on this and will it help with captures?

well, after really no help from any responses, here's what I did and are immediately getting better results. in the hardware raid bios setup I have my stripe size set to 128k (highest it can go). boot into xp and add the raid as a partition and quick formatted in NTFS and changed the "allocation size unit" to 64k from the "default size" setting (I saw this setting in a matrox video forum I think). wow, noticed immediately slight performance increase and are now capturing much better. I wonder if I'll get even more performance if I jump that "allocation unit size" to 512 or even 1024 as it looks like I can go all the way to 8megs. obviously ill have to format the partition again so has anyone set there's any higher and got good results?