Downloading Video To Laptop

[samran]

Hi all,

Just as a follow up to the recent topic on video editing, I have had a few problems downloading my home movies from my digital video camera.

I have a Compaq Presario 1503AP laptop, Pentium 4 CPU 2.0Ghz with 256MB of Ram and about 18.6 gig of memory.

While downloading on other people laptops the picture is fine, when it comes to my notebook the picture is not clear (I get electronic "snow" where there are missing pixels) and frames drop quite frequently.

My question: what can I do to counter this problem? Firstly, is there anything that I can do to my notebook to make it run faster? Do I need to upgrade my RAM (is that possible with a note book).

Any responses would be welcome, including links to any handy web sites.

Cheers

[samran]

BUMP.....

Seriously though, anyone out there able to help me?

[hansco]

Sounds like your computer is not running fast enough to keep up with the capture.

The video capture is usually done in real time which means the Camcorder plays and the computer has to keep up with the stream of video coming into it and write it to disk.

I would suggest stopping every other program running on your PC before starting a capture especially any virus software as this might try and scan the data being written to disk and slow your PC down considerably. Run a defrag on your hard disk so the large capture file isn't spread all over the drive in a fragmented file causing slow access while writing.

What software are you using for the capture? Your laptop spec should be good enough to handle it but more ram always helps as this means windows isn't using your hard disk for a swap file slowing down disk access for your capture program.

Look at your manual for your laptop for ram upgrade possibility's.

Hope it helps.

Simon

[samran]

Thanks Simon,

Will give disabling the anti-virus software a try, which I do have running constantly and see how that goes.

Cheers

samran

[fat_bald_farang]

ok

disable your virus checker.

my advice is to buy a desktop with a miro dc50 + bundled with adobe premier editing software. it seems as of now you still can't get the hi-end with a note book.

fatty (lecturer in digital video prioduction) (and show off)

[samran]

Like your style fat bald farang....

tried disabling the virus checker and did a de-frag even though it told me I didn't need one. Still hasn't worked. Any other advice before I head down to Pantip to get but some RAM?

Am using Unlead DVD workshop. Also get the same crappy pictures using Widows Movie Maker v2

[pnustedt]

Any other advice before I head down to Pantip to get but some RAM?

Buy a Dazzle Digital Video Creator 150 - will solve all your video problems (assuming you have USB2).

[Pink Mist]

Post in this link. In my PC I got 512 Meg in reality only about 480 is available am gonna go to 1 Gig cause my machine really struggles at times, ram wont hurt. I am even thinking of getting a hard drive just for capture. Everyone was right turn off all you arn't using. There are some settings you can change to help capture, you could check them but depends what windows you are using.