Capturing to an external HD problem!

hasler5 wrote on 7/30/2003, 10:14 AM

I need your help on this guys!

Hardware is:

Toshiba Notebook Satellite S501
Windows XP SP1
512 MB RAM
Western Digital external HD 120GB at 7,200 rpm with 2 MB buffer
Vegas Video 4
Sony TRV-38 MiniDV camcorder

The camcorder is daisy chained to the external HD which in turn is connected to the laptop via firewire.

Here is the problem: When I try to capture video using my internal drive, I don’t get any dropped frames at all…it works flawlessly, however when I try to capture video to the external drive that’s where I’m dropping frames like hell. I don’t have anything running in the background except VV, I used “Enditall” software and even ran msconfig to kill all the background tasks including anti-virus prog. The external drive is set for optimum performance meaning write-caching is enable.

I’ve seen a lot of recommendations on this board including setting the DMA to on, which I have not done yet. I guess this is my last resort (unless you have more ideas).

Is there anybody out there who had some experience with the Western Digital hard drive?

Anybody had bad experience with a Toshiba firewire card (not exactly sure what brand is the card)?

Is daisy-chaining the camcorder and the hard drive a bad idea? If it is, what firewire card for a laptop can you recommend?

Do I need to update my BIOS and/or firewire card driver?

As you can see guys, I’m running out of options here. Any help is greatly appreciated

TIA,
Ric

Comments

Former user wrote on 7/30/2003, 10:20 AM

DMA is not an option on an external firewire drive.

I would guess the daisychaining is causing the problem. Too much information trying to flow through the same path. If you had two firewire connections, seperate for each device (could be on the same card though) it might work.

Dave T2

DGrob wrote on 7/30/2003, 10:43 AM

I had a similar problem with a similar setup. Essentially the DV streaming into the OS on C and being redirected back out to the external drive overwhelmed my Belkin PCMCIA firewire card, even using two ports rather than daisy chained. My Dell notebook had a PCI 4 pin firewire, which I connected to the camera. Then connected the external drive to the PCI port. No problems capturing ever afterl

FYI, if you print to tape you may encounter the dreaded Blue Screen using this configuration in reverse. Try copying your rendered avi to C (temporarily), and printing back out to the camcorder from there. Then delete the copy on C. This little workaround has been rock solid for me now for a few months, following several months of mind-altering PTT problems.

Good luck, DGrob

AVERAGEJOE wrote on 7/30/2003, 11:59 AM

agreed....use a pcmcia card for connecting the ext HD, you are stealing bandwidth...OR, what i do now, capture to the int HD then render out to the ext HD, and then erase the avi from the int. for your next project...kinda like making the HD your rendering archive

BTW, my 30G sony partition gets about 1.5 hours of capture, not bad.