I have been capturing some video footage from my Mini DV Camcorder to my pc (2gb Ram) via firewire cable and every so often there is a slight hiccup.

It is more noticaeble if the images are moving at the time or have someone or something moving in them.
It appears as if there is a brief pause and then a couple of frames are dropped and it then carries on as normal. This happens randomly through the capture.

My thought were that it was reminiscent of when i started out using a less powerful pc with little ram and the cache was filling up and or using the hard drive for memory, but since then i purchased a new pc and have not had these problems again until now, is it possible that over time the more things that are installed on the pc the slower the memory becomes causing this issue? If so how do i clear it out? I always turn off obivous things such as virus software and internet connections to make sre these are not performing tasks in the background but it there anything else i can do with the ram?

looking forward to your replies and ideas as always.

Mark.

Good news is that capture has absolutely nothing to do with RAM!

Bad news is that this can be very hard to pin down!

In the 9 months you have been posting you have not once listed your PC specs. It might help.

If this just stated happening, I would suspect your HD. Try defragging just before you capture and of course having tons of free space goes without saying.

How much free space do you have on your hard drive? When was the last time you did a defrag? Did you ever play around with setting up your virtual memory?

Go to System Properties. Under Performance Options, "Visual Effects" tab set to best performance then set Virtual Memory by following the image. Ste the Virtual Memory for your machine at about 1 1/2 times your actual memory. I have 2g memory so mine is set to 3 G; with your 2 G , it should be the same. That should help.

You can clean up your memory by simply shutting off your computer and rebooting. There are some programs out there that will do that without a reboot.

What video card do you have? Please post your computer specs in your signature.

Virtual Memory settings will make as much difference as RAM, absolutely none…

The capture path is from Firewire to CPU to HD. No memory is involved.

Thanks guys,

I think the defrag idea is the answer i did a defrag and then decided to capture to a different partition that was clean anyway and it seemed to capture perfectly! Should have started here first!

Will sort my signature out, but the basics are HP Pavilion, Pentium D 3.2GHz, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 7600 GS.

Regards

Mark.