Dropped Frames / FireWire Out / Premiere Pro

T

techniartist

New member
Hey everyone -- I've been lurking on the DVXuser forums for quite sometime but have never had a reason to post (most likely because I just got a DVX after 3 years of waiting on Friday -- go me).

I'm having some problems in both Premiere Pro 1.5 and Premiere Pro 2.0 with capturing video, either 24pA, 24p, 30p, or 60i.

I'm running into the situation of dropped frames. I'll lose about 1 frame every 4 seconds -- and it's making workflow impossible. Dropped frames change the cadence of the 2:3:3:2 pulldown making reconstituting 24pA frames completely unworkable.

My hard drives are sound -- 60MB/s average on all of them and my system is stable (3ghz HT). I've never had problems before capturing DV -- from a number of sources whether XL1s or little handycams.

I'm also having a problem with outputting FireWire to the monitor through the DVX. Connection between DVX and monitor is sound, but intermittently I'll start seeing strange black artifacts on the screen (both on the DVX display and the external monitor). They look like large black boxes running across segments of the screen obscuring any actual image. It making things unworkable.

I am trying to track down another FireWire cable to see if that's the culprit, but in the meantime, does anyone have any ideas? Can a faulty cable cause connectivity loss -- could that be the reason for the dropped frames? Could the DVX firewire in/out be having a problem (defective unit)?

Any comments would be appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Hmmm... dropouts every 4 seconds make me suspect that there's something running in the background on your system every 4 seconds and causing a problem or possibly an IRQ conflict with the firewire port. However, if you say that you have no problem capturing DV from other cams, that would tend to rule out your PC; especially if you're having problems just going directly to a firewire-connected monitor.

Have you tried loading the tape from the DVX into another DV cam and seeing if it transfers OK? Then you would know whatever is on tape is OK or not. Swapping the firewire cable is also a good idea. I hate trusting those wimpy 4-pin firewire connections. Keep swapping individual components in the data chain one at a time to see if you can isolate the problem.

-Dan
 
Dan,

Thanks for your comments. I finally tracked down the frame dropping issue. Turns out that it's something running in the background. I trashed all my processes and tried again and it recorded stable -- which allowed me to go into After Effects and review a clip at 24pA for the first time. VERY NICE. :)

I wasn't being entirely fair to the cirucmstances. The last time I captured a lot of footage without incident was a while ago (12+ months) and there has been numerous un/installs since. My job now is to track down exactly what process is doing it. My bet is on either Google Desktop (indexing) or some of the VMware processes that load up even if VMware isn't even running. Also have Microsoft Defender up. I'll just have to break it down one at a time.


The Firewire out issue that I'm seeing is actually isolated to After Effects preview out. I failed to mention this before (that's what you get posting at 3 in the morning). It displays on both the DVX display and the S-VIDEO feed from the DVX so it's obviously a software issue in AE or AE's socket to 1394 because Premiere out is pretty stable. It appears as various black boxes randomized on the screen at various intervals. If I'm scrubbing through a preview in AE or having a lot of effect activity previewing out (changing settings, etc.) it will go away for a moment or so, and then returns. It's what I imagine people mean when they're referring to "drop out".

I plan on busting out my digital camera and taking a picture of the artifcact later on tonight. At that point I'll post it to a couple of sites to see if anyone has any ideas.

Thanks again for you help -- hopefully you'll be willing to take a look at that shot when I get it up later.


ta~
 
Glad to hear you identified your problem. You might check out this utility for finding the actual culprit:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/Autoruns.mspx

You can use it disable junk that gets started when you boot your system or login. It's amazing all the crap that can quietly accumlate in the startup. One thing I like about this tools is that you can disable an item without having to delete it. If you find out you really need it, you can simply enable it again.

The artifact problem with AE is curious. You might want to post that over in the AE forum.

-Dan
 
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