Pinnacle Studio 9.1 - reading other 'captures'

[Don Tolson]

Just installed Studio 9 and upgraded via the web site to 9.1. Seems to run fairly slowly on my 2.1 GHZ 500Mb RAM, 100Gb HD machine. Is this thing a memory hog?

Anyway, no matter what I do, I can't seem to get it to capture properly from my Sony TRV460 Digital 8 camera. Yea, the capture works, but Studio is dropping a lot of frames (over 150 in the space of 10 mins of video @ DV quality).

Yep, I turned off all other apps, turned off the preview window, checked the capture speed of my HD, etc. but still I can't get a clean capture. The only thing I can think of now, is to get another HD, since I am attempting to capture to my C: drive (where the OS resides). ...and possibly another 512M of RAM.

I am able to capture @ DV quality using ArcSoft's ShowBiz very easily, but Pinnacle won't read the .AVI file created from the raw capture. It will read it if I have ShowBiz 'make a movie' of it (again as another .AVI). Anyone else noticed this?

[Jason Dunn]

I don't have 9, I'm still using 8.x.x, but in general I can say that 150 dropped frames out of 18,000 (10 minutes) isn't much to get concerned about. The real test is how it looks when you play it back - can you notice the dropped frames?

In terms of fixing it, have you tried defragging first? That might help. Generally speaking it's very difficult to get good results when capturing to a drive that has other data on it, let alone a drive as chaotic as a main C: drive. If you have a 100 GB drive, why not make a video partition? 100 GB is a lot of space for only one drive letter. :-)

In terms of it being a memory hog, if it's anything like version 8, then yeah, it is quite heavy on the memory. It's easy to use, but it's not a fast-feeling program. If you want speed, look to the Sonic Foundry stuff now owned by Sony.

[Don Tolson]

Thanks, Jason... yea, I defragged as well. I think the best bet though, is to get myself another 200G or so. ..and I think I'll look at upping the RAM another 512M as well. I'm finding I'm needing about 12 to 15G per capture, which becomes about 30G when made into a 'movie'. But I won't worry so much about lost frames now, since I now notice that ArcSoft's ShowBiz (comes with Sonic MyDVD) dropped about 650 frames in 45 mins.

Any ideas on Pinnacle not able to read the raw .AVI captures from ShowBiz? They work in Windows Media Player. It's a real pain having to have ShowBiz 'render' the captures into another .AVI which Studio will then read.

I also notice that Studio's playback isn't as smooth on my PC. It's very jerky and audio is 'dropped'. I don't know if that's the missing frames or limitations of my graphics processor.

[Jason Dunn]

It's probably a Type 1/Type 2 issue:

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,5840

I really wish Pinnacle would just fix their software so that it would read both types of DV-AVI files, but even though I brought up this issue with their product manager two years ago, they didn't seem to think it was important.

[Don Tolson]

Thanks, Jason... I'll try it tonight and see if it does the trick. I'd rather stick with one app, rather than flipping back and forth, and Studio seems to have a lot more capability.

But hey... ShowBiz was free with my DVD-R/W drive!