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Digital editing - dropped frames? Help!

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Anybody help with a problem I am having with digital editing? When I edit the video from my PC9 though Microsoft Moviemaker 2 on my laptop and download it to VHS back through my camera I get the occasional dropped frame which makes for a slightly jerky product. My laptop easily exceeds the recommended spec for Moviemaker in terms of processor speed, RAM and storage. The problem does not occur when i domload direct from the camera to VHS. I bet I am not the first person that has had this problem!

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Assuming your laptop really is beefy enough (I take recommended specs with a large pinch of salt), play close attention to what going on in your system as you dump. Im assuming you're dumping from laptop, to camera, to vhs deck all in real time. I recommend that you ensure your paging file is big enough and preferably on a seperate partition to your system drive. In a desktop I'd recommend on a different ide channel and hard drive, but thats probably not an option on your laptop - paging file should basically be ram*2. Make sure you aren;t doing anything while dumping and dont have any other programs running, and use msconfig.exe to remove all those unwanted processes that could take system resource and cause a momentary blip. Make sure you have lots of contiguous hard drive space - a fragmented movie file might cause dropout as the access switches to the next fragment. Pre-render as much as you can. Hope this helps.
Rich M

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I understand the speed of the drive is really important. I use a 7200 rpm fire wire drive for my footage. The onboard drive on my laptop is in the 4500rpm range and probably would drop frames...

-Hixxx
death,as men call him, ends what they call men
-but beauty is more now than dying’s when

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I have same problem from a 1.6ghz pent 4 512 mb ram laptop. I have a sony pc-5 doing same thing when PTT it misses at times. I then tried a pc100 and a pc9 doing exactly the same process and both of these cameras worked fine. I am pretty sure it is my camera which is causing the problem. I figure when I am ready to P.T.T. then I will borrow a friends camera for the hour or so to finish until i fix or replace the pc-5.



John Maggio

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Thanks for your responses - some useful thoughts which I will consider once I understand the techie stuff. Seems like I need to check the technical spec again (I had thought that 2.4 GHz, 512 Mb RAM and 25Gb of unused hard drive would be enough - its a new computer so I dont think i need to defrag yet, but I hadnt checked the hard rive rotation speed) and make sure I have nothing else running in the background. Interesting to hear that I am not the only one suffering.

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Its not the spin speed thats important, although its a good indicator. Its the read write speed which must be maintained above 5mb/sec.
go here, download raptest and run it.
http://www.canopus.com/US/products/free_utilities/pm_free_utilities.asp
Go here download enditall, install it and run it before starting up Premiere shutting everything down that you don't need.
http://www.pcmedixwebs.com/enditall.htm
Finally, partition your disc to make a separate drive for your footage, choonz, graphics, titles, and preview file storage, set Premiere up so it writes the preview temp files to the same drive.
Defrag once a fortnight or so, if you are working heavy on the edits.
I did the suffering many years ago, its a whole lot easier these days, believe me!B|

--------------------

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

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