Video editing on a Windows PC - what can I do to prevent dropped frames?

Info about setting up hard disk drives and Windows 9x PCs for video editing and for avoiding dropped frames. Some info is also included here about Win2K (and XP), but not much. But this is being added on an ad-hoc basis.

One important point to check - if you have ever had the MGI/Roxio VideoWave editing program installed on your PC - is whether a rather troublesome DV Codec is still on your system. Instructions can be found on this url for how to get rid of it in Win9x systems: http://www.dvdoctor.net/cgi-bin/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000135.html

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There are a number of reasons why this [dropped frames] might be happening - the most likely being:

1/ Your hard disk drives are not optimised for video

2/ You have a number of programs running in the background that are interfering with capture and playback.

3/ You are running a program, such as Adobe Premiere 6 or Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6, on an OHCI-standard FireWire port or card but have not downloaded from the software maker's websites the updaters required to give decent quality timeline playback (assuming, that is, you even have a PC fast enough for the job - which should be 600MHz or faster; though you might get away with 450MHz).

Here what you need to do:

1/ Optimise your hard disk set up as follows:

* Try to make sure you are capturing to your fastest hard disk - ideally NOT the boot disk - and that the disk has plenty of space on it and is not badly fragemented.

Ideally, you should record video to a drive installed just for that purpose, not to the system drive. If you are recording to the system drive, it is better to have that drive partitioned and to record to the new logical drive you create.

However, you should back up your drive before doing this AND should ensure that you use a non-destructive partitioning program, such as the latest version of PowerQuest's Partition Magic (currently V7) or Norton's Ghost. Free partitioning tools are also available and I'll include links to them here if someone can let me know the urls.

* Make sure that DMA is turned on for any IDE hard disks and ATAPI/IDE CD/DVD drives. In System Properties - go to each drive individually and switch this on. If there is no option there for DMA, then check your motherboard manual to see if the motherboard uses a separate program for DMA enabling. If there is nothing there, then check that DMA has not been disabled in the PC's Bios. The Bios is usually accessible when the PC starts booting up, by pressing a key - such as Del or F2.

Note that in Win2K (and XP), although DMA is also selected from Device Manager, you need to go to the section called, "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers".

Win2K users should also check out this posting from Tim Callaghan called, "How to Supercharge your Windows 2000 installation - some tips". It's at: http://www.dvdoctor.net/cgi-bin/ubb/Forum10/HTML/004165.html

I know for a FACT that some laptop PCs with SIS motherboard chipsets (including models from AJP's range) are not able to have DMA switched on under XP unless a small Win 2K register-fix utility has been run. This utility (called something like SIS.exe) should be available from the company that supplied the PC.

Be aware, too, if using Win2K (pre SP2) and ATA/100 drives, that you need to download a small (149KByte) fix that allows these drives to run properly.

This fix can be downloaded from: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q260/2/33.ASP

After installing this fix, it is possible for Win2K to wrongly report what mode has been set. At the address above, this oddity is described thus,
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After you install this hotfix, you may notice an incorrect "PIO" value displayed on the Advanced Settings tab for an IDE device in Device Manager. This does not mean that the device is functioning in "PIO" mode. Windows 2000 is displaying an incorrect value.
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* Ideally, have your hard disk(s) on one IDE cable and CD stuff on the other - often older CDs can't have DMA enabled, and will slow down a hard disk if on the same cable.

* Be aware that some ATA drives (ATA/66;100 and 133) MUST be connected using 40-pin/80-wire data cables. However, even old ATA/33 drives benefit from using such cables which reduce the chance of data being corrupted by electromagnetic interference.

Take care, however, because some of these cables have only 39 pin holes, and can cause serious damage if you try to push them onto motherboard connectors that have 40 pins.

* Also be aware that older PC motherboards may not recognise new ATA/66; ATA/100 or ATA/133 drives. As a result, they treat these drives as being something old that they've not heard about, and this means that the drives save and read data at about one-quarter of the speed that they should (maybe even worse than that!).

Overcoming this problem involves downloading a DOS program from the drive maker's web site which, when run, lets you choose how the drive will report itself to the motherboard.

On older PCs you'd ensure that the drive reported itself as being an ATA/33 model. That way you'll find it runs like an
express train!

With PCs that can recognise drives that use the even faster ATA/66, you would, of course, get the drive to report itself as as being ATA/66. Similarly if you have ATA/100 - and a motherboard that recognises that system - then that's how you'd set the drive to report itself.

I'm told by Maxtor that the new ATA/133 drives that started to go on sale at the tail end of 2001 will automatically run at the appropriate (ie slower) DMA setting when connected to ATA/66 and ATA/100 boards and controllers. I have not yet verified this.

* Right-click on My Computer and select Properties - click on the
Performance tab and then on the button called, "File System". For "Typical role of this computer", select "Network Computer". Then turn Read-ahead optimization to None. Next, click on the Troubleshooting tab and click in the button tick box - Disable write-behind caching for all drives. Ignore Windows warnings when you make these changes and OK your way out - you'll then have to restart you PC.

2/ Turn off all background tasks that are not video-editing related.

These include MS FindFast (installed by MS Office) - which you can switch off in Control Panel - all virus checkers and disk security stuff, and Windows' Scheduling Agent.

Most of these can be switched off in one place. Go to start, programs, accessories, system tools, system information. This brings up Microsoft's System Information Program. Click on the Tools menu item and pick System Configuration Utility.

Click on the Startup tab and turn off the programs that you know you don't need for video editing - including Windows Scheduling Agent.

You'll then need to reboot the PC

3/ If you are running an OHCI-standard FireWire card or port and are dropping frames, check out the web site of your video editing software maker - looking on support and download pages for updaters that specifically address this problem. Adobe (adobe.com) and Ulead (ulead.com) both have such updaters available for their OHCI-compliant programs.

You must also install the latest version of Direct X - currently V8.1 (about 11MByte) but see below if you own an older JVC camcorder. V8.1 includes the Video Capture Update for DirectX 8.0 - formerly known as Digital Video Update - which needed to be installed with DirectX 8.0a.

V8.1 can be downloaded free from: http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads/default.asp

The DirectX 8a downloads tended to cure a LOT of people's dropped-frame problems with OHCI-cards, especially if using older JVC-branded camcorders, but it is NOT clear whether this is still the case with V8.1 (judging by some problems that have arisen in Windows XP - which has V8.1 built in).

If you are using an older JVC DV camcorder (on an OS earlier than XP), then it might make sense to instead install DirectX 8a and the DV updater.

These seem no longer to be available from Microsoft's DirectX pages, but are available on some non-Microsoft sites (how much longer for, though, I do not know).

If you need these downloads and can't find them after searching the web (starting at [url=http://www.google.com),]www.google.com),[/url] I'm happy to email them to people - though their considerable size may mean that they are blocked by email limits imposed by your internet service provider (or that you think your email program is broken because it is taking so long to complete its download of your email).

If the above tips don't work, then do feel free to post a message in the hard drives forum on this messageboard.

Such a posting should have a meaningful subject line - not, "Help" but, something along the lines of "Overcoming dropped frame problem with Premiere 6 and xyz's OHCI cards" - and spell out in DETAIL the
problem, and give FULL info about the hardware configuration of your PC and what operating system you are using.

Cheers

Bob C

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