Digital flaws in some of my CFHD files

[Craig Irving]

Going through my footage, I've noticed quite a few errors like this. I've reviewed my tapes and confirmed that these flaws don't exist on the original tape. I have been converting to Cineform during the capture process for these files, but I may just have to recapture again and this time do the conversion with HD-Link.

I noticed when setting up Adobe for Cineform conversion during capture that you lose the ability to end the capture when/if there is a frame dropped. In fact it doesn't even report dropped frames. Could this have something to do with these digital errors? It's only a few frames long, then it goes away. But it's been rather annoying to re-capture these bits.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[David Newman]

This a support question as it is likely something in your system causing dropped packet between your camera and the PCs Firewire (can be a bad Firewire port.) Firewire packet loss is not often a software issue.

[Chan Ee Jien]

I had this problem too and most of the times its a crapshoot (especially when capturing and converting longer files, shorter files seems to be okay)

I changed firewire ports on the mobo, cable, used a firewire card, change MOBO and reformat but could never find out the reason why the problem still occurs.

But when I used HDLink to capture in MT2, it worked out fine. I now just do the conversion as a second step.

[Kris Bird]

Computer specs?

[Jose Ortiz]

This is something that cineform people needs to take care very soon. Is driving me crazy and I'm wasting a lot of time in capturing twice my tapes because of this.
This is something that started with my last build of Prospect HD. My computer settings are the same.
I'm capturing with firewire with a HV20 30f footage.
Even using HDlink is comming with the same error....

Please we need some help with this issue.

[David Newman]

Nothing has changed with the part of the code in years, we nearly always find it to be a hardware issue. It is a dropped firewire packet, to trick is to determine why your PC is doing it.

[Alex Raskin]

Separating two processes:

1. capturing m2t from the cam

and

2. transcoding m2t into Cineform

should fix the issue, in my experience.

I actually use free utility CapDVHS to do step 1. Never a problem.

Then I do file conversion in Cineform's HDLink. Almost never a problem here.

I do agree that one-step HDLink capture/transcoding is a total crapshoot. Tested it with different versions of AspectHD up to 4.3.2 with the same result.

Also Aspect seems to be picky as to what hard drive system are you saving your files on.

For instance, it would not reliably save on my SCSI drive connected via a SCSI card.

Note that aside from there quirks, in my personal opinion, Cineform is a lifesaver and a fantastic codec. I use AspectHD with Adobe PPro and After Effects almost daily and love it.

[David Newman]

Version of the software will not change a hardware issue. Basically your Firewire has a certain number of buffers, if your CPU doesn't services the card before the buffers over run, it will drop packets. Most PCs 95+% have no issues, some just have a bad/cheap Firewire implementation (so a new card with fix it,) the other few have bus design issues. The reason transcoding makes the Firewire drop packets, is the CPU is now busy encoding (you can make it drop packets loading it up with other functions if the FW port is cheap.) The FW drivers should interrupt the user mode encode and service the buffers before they overflow -- if the card and device drivers are working correctly, unfortunately this in not always the case. Doing a real-time transcode like this from Firewire is pretty rare (CineForm is one of the very few), but as PCs get faster it does get easier.