Incomplete tape capture
 

Using Vegas 5 on a laptop with attached FW drive, I have about 35 minutes of video recorded to a new DV tape. When I tell the Vegas tape capture program to capture the entire tape it displays the video up to some random point and then stops, while the timer continues running as does the DV camera. What could be causing the capture to stop?

It may have dropped a frame. There is a setting in preferences to stop capturing when a dropped frame is detected.

Also, do you have any gaps in your timecode?

I have the option selected to stop capture if a frame is dropped, but I'm unclear as to the behavior I should see in Vegas if this occurs, and nothing in the documentation to explain it. Is there no error dialog? I did finally get the entire sequence captured, but curious what made it stop.

If you have ANY dropped frames, throw out the capture and start again.

What I usually do is set the video captre process to "high priority" through the Windows task manager. I think it's called "vidcap50". This way you can even do other things and the capture process will still get enough CPU time.

Thanks for that tip to set the priority of the capture process. Is the only indicator of a dropped frame the stopping of the monitor display during capture?

Whenever I've used the video capture, it has a count of dropped frames. I think there are two modes to capturing; basic (tape-at-once) and piece-by-piece -- which are you using?

I've always captured the entire tape at once.

I was capturing the entire tape. The dropped frames count was 0 on each of the failed transfers. There should not be any timecode gaps. I started with a fresh tape and shot several clips without rewinding the tape. Each time the process failed, it failed in a different place. If there was a timecode issue I would expect the failure to occur at the same place each time it failed. Is that not correct?

What was your hard drive doing at the time it failed? Was it on solid? (when capturing, it really only requires "blinks")

I had a problem capturing one evening and discovered my hard drive was suddenly being hit hard for some reason (and I'm not sure I ever determined what the reason was). I have subsequently captured fine to that same drive. (BTW, a reboot didn't help that evening.)

I DID make some changes at that point, though. First, I made sure I did a full defrag on that drive. Then I looked at some other settings and turned off "Indexing" on all drives.

The hard drive is a new Matrox One Touch II external drive. I don't recall the drive light being on solid. At any rate, since no one seems to have seen a similar behavior from Vegas I'll assume the system wasn't keeping up with the transfer and will try the suggestion to give the capture process a higher priority on my next capture.

How is the drive connected in relation to the camera?

1)
computer --> drive --> pass thru to camera

2)
Computer --> drive
Computer --> camera
using two firewire connections on the same firewire card

3)
Computer --> drive
Computer --> camera
Using connections two separate firewire cards.


My external firewire drive is using #1 and seems to work fine.

If you also have USB on the external drive, you might try connecting it that way and testing as well.

I have #1 too. Everything is FW.