Rainbow Runner Dropped frames

[Arthur]

I have had my Rainbow Runner/Millennium II for well over a year now and during that time I have never been able to put anything onto the time line without dropping frames.

In my efforts I have :-
Changed my mother board to a Titanium IIB
Changed my processor to an Intel 233MMX
Increased my ram from 64 EDO to 128 SDRAM
Reformatted my C Drive and loaded the latest version of Windows 95
Fitted a second hard drive (Maxtor 20.4gig 7,200 rpm)
Downloaded the latest drivers from the Matrox web site
Loaded the latest version of MSP (5.2)

...but it still drops frames.

I am now feeling like giving up and buying a Fast AV 2000 or a Mira DC30 plus.

Will I be any better off?

The latest advice from Matrox was, (quote) "It's not our fault ring ULead.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Arthur.

[Migou]

What do you use to capture?
Do you have the same # of dropped frames with pc-vcr than with Ulead MSP ? ( average)

( personally i don't like ulead's capture... PC-Vcr is good as well but runs better with no background programs running )


did you try AVI_IO to do your capturing ? ??

It solved all my dropped frames problems...


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Hardware:
Maxtrox Marvel G200-TV AGP.....|.Windows 98 SE
PII 400 Mhz ( no overclock )......|.Maxtor 9.1 Gb (IDE)
Asus P2B...............................|.Western Digital 8.4 Gb (IDE)
256 Meg RAM..........................|.Maxtor 27.2 Gb (IDE)
SB16 AWE32...........................|.Lexmark 7000
Cable Modem

[Phil Pugh]

Have you got DMA enabled on your disks? If you haven't then you can expect dropped frames. What speed does the Matrox HD test program give for your disks?

[Arthur]

To Migou: I always use the Remote VCR and only occasionaly drop frames in capture. I can never get the MSP capture to work so I don't bother with it.

I have not tried the AVI_IO but I will give it a go.

To Phil:- I don't know the answer to either of your questions but I will check them out. Thanks for the tip.

Arthur.

[Keith Wiebe]

Here's how I solved my dropping frames problem (notice I didn't drop any frames upon capture necessarily but on playback a stutter here and there was noticed). I sold my Canon Hi-8 camcorder and bought a Sony digital 8 and also bought a Raptor capture card from Canopus and now no more stutters! The latest drivers had the Rainbow working pretty good but I always got a skipping field here and there that I got tired of! Now I have a Rainbow Runner to get rid of if it ever gets back from RMA dept. to take care of some s-video problems.

[A_BIT]

Last night I made a complete movie start to finish with MSP 5.2 I did a single 8 minute capture with no dropped frames, not one. I used the MSP 5.2 cpature program @ 704 X 480 29.97 frames/sec, selected exactly match frame rate. The audio was set to 44.1 stereo and perfectly synched throughout the entire clip. The camera was a Sony D8 TRV103. I used the S-Video connector.

Playback was also perfect, with not one hesitation, stutter or dropped frame. Amazingly, all audio & video was captured to to the C: drive, which was also used for Ulead temp files.

With longer projects, I move the clips to the D: drive to prevent disk thrashing during playback.

My configuration is below...

I have had dropped frames during capture with other capture programs including Avid Cinema and PC-VCR. The MSP capture program's exactly match frame rate feature is excellent, and is not found in the other 2 programs. It is very important to keep the footpring of loaded modules on the PC down to a minimum, and also to have your drives defragged.

Good luck!


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Anthony

• Slot 1 Celeron 400, Asus P2B, 256MB PC-100
• AGP Marvel-TV 8MB
• Turtle Beach Montego PCI sound card (Y connector on audio out per Matrox tech support)
• C: IBM 10.1, 5400, Primary on 1, System, Swap, Software
• D: IBM 13.5, 5400, Primary on 2, Dedicated to video
• E: Memorex 48x CD, Secondary on 1
• F: Yamaha CD-RW 2x2x8, Secondary on 2
• Win98, FAT32 on C: & D:
• MediaStudio Pro 5.2

[Mocap]

I only lose frames occasionally. I have solved the problem by cleaning a 3 gig partition on my 7200rpm 20 gig drive so that the only files that are written to it are the videos I capture off of my VCR and the conversions I make from AVI to MPEG.
My System is:
Celeron 333A O/C to 450
128 PC-100 Ram
3.5 gig/20 gig/8 gig HDDs
G400 non max and RR/G (both brand new)
Toshiba 40X SCSI CD
SB LIVE
Lots of other goodies