I recently tried capturing a live event via the firewire port on an A1 and feeding this into Vegas 7.0d on my Dell Inspiron 9400, the spec of which is below.

Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz Processor
2GB DDR2 RAM
160GB SATA Hard Disk Drive
256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 Graphics Card
17" WUXGA Display
6 x USB Ports
1 Firewire Port
VGA & DVI Ports for external display

As per normal, I was also capturing to tape, Panny AY-DVM63AMQ tapes.

I was rather hoping the live capture would yield better results as I'm finding I get about three dropouts per tape, but this wasn't the case. Over the course of the day (about seven tapes) I guess I'd have about 20 instances of dropout, whereas the live capture was over 100 instances of dropout.

Initially I put this down to the camera movement of panning and tilting and the constraints it was putting on the flimsy 4-pin firewire connection port on the A1.

I can just about live with two or three instances of dropout using the tapes, but find it's inconceivable to work a project with 100 or so instances of dropout.

There were no third-party s/w running on the laptop during the time of capture - just Vegas 7.0d.

Can anyone give me any tips or guidance to give me less dropout with tape and during a live capture?

TIA
Neil

You will have better results if you capture to an external USB or Firewire drive. Capturing to the C: drive is problematic because of the need for Windows to do OS calls. Plus, you may have a slower HDD (4500 RPM) which is not as tolerant of head movement between the OS area of the drive and where you are storing the video.

If you can't or won't use a second drive, then turn off File Indexing on the C: drive by opening Windows Explorer, right click on C:/, click Properties and uncheck indexing. Then, you might want to optimize your WinXP services configuration for best performance using the Black Viper's guide (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm).