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General discussion

And the Bottleneck is Where?

Dec 7, 2004 2:02PM PST

I'm helping a certain relative who wants to do video on his budget PC. It has 256 RAM and 1.2 Ghz, so (I thought) it would suffice. After convincing him that he needed a firewire port we found that only one port can be used at a time. He can capture bad video through his USB 1 port to his external drive using firewire, or he can capture via firewire to his internal drive -- he cannot do both simultaneously. I can on a notebook with 900 Mhz.

So, I'd like to know what would be the first (and second, etc.) thing to check or upgrade. The motherboard? Chipsets? Where could the bottleneck be?

Discussion is locked

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 7, 2004 3:42PM PST

I would think usb 1.0 would definitely be one. If you want maximum resolution and max. frame rate then nothing less than usb 2.0 will do. So what kind of video (digital or analog) is your friend working with?

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 7, 2004 6:40PM PST

He uses a Dazzle capture device to capture analog video. It is intended for capturing stills from video, but he discovered that it would capture video, though low-quality with dropped frames here and there. It almost looks like old 8mm film, a side effect he kind of likes. So he has been making videos with this and by capturing the audio separately. I finally got him to get an IEEE 1394 card for video capture and an external drive. It has three connectors. Problem is, the PC, for some reason, will not capture to the external drive. It acts like it can't handle both capture through, and saving to the external drive through the IEEE card at the same time. It will allow either operation alone.

Someone told him it was probably the motherboard. I have no idea, and would like a few opinions as to what could cause this inability.

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 8, 2004 3:14PM PST

I maybe wrong here but I thought firewire is for digital input only. So the problem may not be the external Hdd. To use firewire, an analog to digital coversion device is require. I understand those costs more than an analog capture devices.

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 8, 2004 8:17PM PST

I have a notebook PC with two firewire ports, and I can capture DV (using an analog-to-digital converter) by using both at the same time: video in through one and out the other to my external drive.

I'm trying to figure out why his PC won't do that.

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 9, 2004 1:40AM PST

But he CAN capture with usb1.0? I can tell you there is a BIG difference between usb1 and usb2 (although my system is only 733mhz.), I can't even capture low resolution without dropping frames but with usb2..no problem.

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 9, 2004 8:40AM PST

The problem has nothing to do with USB. He happened to find out that his capture card for stills (USB) would capture poor quality video with dropped frames -- it almost looks like old 8mm film. That's not the issue here.

The issue is with his firewire card. It will not simultaneously capture and save to an external drive, that's all. We would like to know why.

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Bad drivers??
Dec 15, 2004 4:20AM PST

It may be a case of a bad/poorly written set of driver files for the firewire card. Some drivers are written to take complete control of a port/card until their done with it. Check with the card manufacturer to see if they have this type of issue.

Also, if you just dropped the card into the machine and are using the default Windows drivers they may not be optimized for the card and don't provide full utility.

Why don't you capture the video to the internal hard drive then write the resulting file to the external drive?

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Re: And the Bottleneck is Where?
Dec 13, 2004 12:39PM PST

So... no guru out there can give me a clue?

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Seems clear to me.
Dec 13, 2004 8:59PM PST

You found out that it doesn't work. The why can be simple. The chipset and being on the PC-Card only has so much bandwidth. It's not enough to do both.

But I fear that you were looking for a fix, and not a "Yep, that might not work".

Bob

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Issue
Dec 14, 2004 9:04AM PST

Actually, I'd just like to be able to tell him what he needs to upgrade his PC so it will handle the video projects he has in mind.

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Let's see. I have this old laptop.
Dec 14, 2004 9:19AM PST

It's a P3-600MHz. I installed a PC-Card USB 2.0 and a Firewire card and it can capture from firewire to the USB 2.0 drive.

It runs Windows 2000 on 256MB RAM and is "Black Viper"'d so it's as optimal as I dare.

It's no speed demon, but beats having nothing on the road.

Future plans are to replace it when:

a - it dies.
b - The dual core Athlon 64 laptops dive under 2KUSD.

Whichever comes first.

Point? Go with what works. In my case I put the drive on USB 2.0 and the camcorder on Firewire.

Bob

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Thanks
Dec 14, 2004 6:19PM PST

That pretty much confirms it, then. Thanks for the input.