Dropped frames with Intensity capture into Cineform

[Alex Raskin]

Capturing via Intensity on Win x64 PC, and removing pulldown on-the-fly.

With capture software, there's usually a counter (or otherwise some indicator) whether any frame were dropped during capture.

Hwo do I know in HDlink if frames were dropped or not?

Thanks.

[David Newman]

We don't get a dropped frame indicator from the hardware, but fortunately we don't drop frames on any model class of PC.

[Alex Raskin]

The system is custom built x64 with 790i mobo and Core 2 Extreme quad-proc Intel at 3Ghz stock, OCd to 3.8GHz. Video cap drive is separate from system one, SATA 3000 Seagate Barracuda 1TB, reliable NS version.

Card is Decklink HD Extreme. (what's up with me and extreme hardware?) :)

BM Intensity's own MediaExpress capture utility pops the warning that "some" frames are dropped when captured into MJPEG codec.

CF HDlink is not displaying any warnings, but I'm afraid the system may be actually dropping frames with CFHD too. Do I need to be afraid on my birthday? Not really :)

I need to know for sure whether frames rae being dropped.

Is it possible to use some 3rd party monitoring system to tell?

[David Newman]

If you CPU is under 80% usage you are completely safe, and that PC seems fast. Our encoder is N-core threaded, and the MJPEG codec is not. Capture a long sequence with audio, if the audio drifts during capture, that could be a sign of lost frames, but only seen that on far slower systems running 95-100% CPU usage.

[Alex Raskin]

I was thinking more along the lines of HDD bandwidth being too slow maybe.

MediaExpress has maybe 30% CPU utilization, and still says it drops frames - on MJPEG encoding! Weird.

HDlink however maxes CPU out at 82 - 98% utilization, which really made me nervous.

I don't think I had such high CPU cycles on my prev machine with a simple Core 2 Duo 3Ghz processor. This one is quad, and all 4 cores are maxed out?

In the end, did the video+sound test as you suggested - and could not detect any kind of issues, be it video or audio. Sync stayed 100% over 12-min segment I recorded, so it seems to be fine...

[David Newman]

The 30% basically means one core is saturating as that codec is not multi-threaded. While 82-98% is high for a CineForm encode (I would have though the machine would do better than that) it might happen with noisy sources running the Filmscan modes. The audio test confirms that you are no dropping frames.