Jerky Video once Captured to Computer

[Jonah McWilliams]

For the record I'm a newbie and know nothing. That said, I recently bought a Canon XL1 for my Church to use. We just started using it but we found that when we capture video to the computer it is jerky. We just recorded on Auto Mode and imported using fire wire.

Through reading other things on this forum I'm wondering if adjusting my frame rate would take care of the problem? Any other suggestions?

Any help would be great, I'm so new to the XL1, I don't know much of anything!

Jonah

[Greg Boston]

Hi Jonah,

Something is wrong there. Most any modern day computer can playback standard DV25 material without jerks or pauses. You may have a codec conflict on your system.

What computer and software are you using to view the captured material?

-gb-

[Don Palomaki]

Agree. Sounds like your PC may not have the horsepower to play full motion video from a DV data stream. If it is an older PC (more than a year or two) expect it to look a bit choppy during the capture process. What counts is the video that is recorded on the capture drive.

Was this based on playing the captured video, watching the video on the monitor during capture, view it in the editor, etc.

And of course, what are the details on the PC, operating system, capture software, editing program, processor speed, hard drive storage, memory, capture card, etc.

[John Miller]

To rule out a capture problem (i.e., frames were dropped during the capturing process), send the captured DV file back to the camcorder. View the video via the camcorder's viewfinder or externally attached monitor and listen to the audio. If the audio and video are both okay when streamed back to the camcorder, then it points to a "horsepower" problem with your PC's playback capability.

It would help to know more about your system - in particular the OS, sound card, CPU, memory, disk drives etc. Under Windows, the system will always drop frames to ensure that the audio is not interrupted during playback. Of course, with enough resources, frames won't get dropped. Other factors that can come into play include using a heavily fragmented drive for video storage (not good!), having an old graphics card (no hardware acceleration/overlay), having integrated (on the motherboard) audio - such as Intel's High Definition Audio - this saps CPU power. And many others.

[Jonah McWilliams]

Sorry guys, I'm working with someone else so getting all the info. takes a little.

The limited info I have is:

System: Imac
Processor: 2.0 GHz
OS: Mac OS
Software: imovie
Memory: 1 Gig

I'm getting the Camcorder tonight to try on the Churchs system which is a little better of a system:

Area-51

Operating System: Windows® XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Processor: Pentium® 4 Processor 560 3.6GHz 1MB Cache
Memory: 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz - 2 x 1024MB
Graphics Processor: ATI RADEON™ X300 PCI Express 128MB DDR
Video Optimizer: AlienAdrenaline: Video Performance Optimizer
Video Cooling: AlienIce™ Video Cooling System - Astral Blue
System Drive: 250GB Western Digital 7,200 RPM w/8MB Cache
Storage Drive: 74GB Western Digital 10,000 RPM w/8MB Cache

I'll post with the results.

Do you guys think the iMac should have problems with it though?

Jonah

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Jonah McWilliams

Do you guys think the iMac should have problems with it though?

Absolutely not!

I have an iMac 1.8 Ghz and it has no problems playing captured video. I can even playback my XDCAM HD material at 1920X1080 at 35mb VBR. It's still smooth.

-gb-

[Waldemar Winkler]

Originally Posted by Jonah McWilliams

For the record I'm a newbie and know nothing. That said, I recently bought a Canon XL1 for my Church to use. We just started using it but we found that when we capture video to the computer it is jerky. We just recorded on Auto Mode and imported using fire wire.

Through reading other things on this forum I'm wondering if adjusting my frame rate would take care of the problem? Any other suggestions?

Any help would be great, I'm so new to the XL1, I don't know much of anything!

Jonah

My 6 year old Mac iBook records firewire feeds fine, but looks jerky on the iMovie monitor because the computer's processor (733Mhz) simply can not record and display at real time. It is an issue of not enough processing speed to perform two heavy data loads simultaneously. My 1.8 G5 can have the same issue, although much less noticable.

Have you performed regular maintenance on your Mac? Done a "Repair Permissions" lately? Dumped "plist" files? The easy way to solve a lot of data contaminations on a Mac is to simply leave it on overnight once a week. The core OS is designed for computers operating on a 24/7 basis. Leave it on and it will clean up it's act evry day. Don't want to do that? Repair Permissions. Turn on Mac and hold Shift key down until you get administrator log-in screen. Release shift key and log in. MENU>GO>Utilities>Disk Utilities (NOT IDISK UTILITIES).
Click on (highlight) hard drive>then click on Repair Disk Utilities.
Wait until done. Long wait if this process hasn't been done in a while. Short wait if done every week.
Restart computer. You will experience a visually noticable improvement in behaviour throughout the computer.
Still got a problem? GO>COMPUTER>USERS> (YOUR NAME IDENTIFER)>LIBRARY>PREFERENCES>com.apple.iMovie.plist ...and trash this file!

You lose any special preferences, but they are very easily rebuilt.

The next time iMovie is opened a brand new, uncontaminated plist file is created, and everything should be fine.

[Jonah McWilliams]

Guys,
Thanks for all your help, sorry I didn't get back sooner. I tried capturing on the PC mentioned above and it worked great. No jerkiness at all.

With that said I will have to look into why it wouldn't capture right on the iMac, I'm sure it was either connection, or capture software that was causing the problem. Thanks again, and sorry I didn't try on other systems before posting.

Jonah