Video AVI Capture Help Please???

[jonesy]

I have an older Sharp video camera (VL-AH151) that uses the high 8 tapes and I want to capture the video off of them and burn to DVD or upload to youtube. I bought a cheap video capture USB device on ebay for $10 and thought I would give it a try.

Ulead Video studio is what it is called and the USB device that camera plugs into is a Syntech. I installed the software one my main computer and all it does is freeze after a few minutes. I finally was able to capture some video with it. Since it wasn't working right I tried installing it on my smaller AMD machine and the software works perfect (nice editing features) but I cannot get any video signal and audio is distorted???

I am fairly knowledgeable about computers, but no nothing about video software or capture. After spending 4 hours last night (up til 1:30am) and 2 hours this morning trying to get this to work I am out of ideas.

Many of you here at MLPF seem to be very computer savy, any thoughts, help or suggestions you could offer would be very appreciated. I have windows XP on both computers and have even tried Windows movie maker but can't get it working properly.

Thanks, jonesy

[Jason]

Sounds like your capture hardware is not very high quality. It might pay to invest in something a little nicer.

[jonesy]

Yeah, I know you get what you pay for. I am thinking that it may be a matter of changing settings? Have you ever done any video capture/editing?

[Sinster]

Give me a link to the capture device you purchased.

Have you check Device manager to see if windows is actually detecting?
When you use Windows Movie Maker are you able to select your capture device?
Any software/firmware updates?

Your vid cam should be in the play mode if you want to capture stuff that already been captured. You should hit play on your vid cam and hit record on your software.. However a lot of vid capture software will allow you to control your vid cam via the sofware.

[djwilbanks]

What kind of USB ports are you using? Video capturing through USB can be horrible if you're doing it through a hub or an older, slower USB device.

[Sinster]

Originally Posted by djwilbanks

What kind of USB ports are you using? Video capturing through USB can be horrible if you're doing it through a hub or an older, slower USB device.

Check to see if your Vid Cam has a firewire port.

[djwilbanks]

Firewire is my port of choice for video capture if I have to transfer from an older device.

[jonesy]

Originally Posted by Sinster

Give me a link to the capture device you purchased.

Have you check Device manager to see if windows is actually detecting?
When you use Windows Movie Maker are you able to select your capture device?

http://www.ulead.com/runme.htm

What I got is called easy cap 2.0 video adapter with audio, model no, DC-60. The USB device shows as Syntech, software is by Ulead.

I bought the capture device from a Hong Seller on ebay and software was included. It was $10 total with shipping so I figured what the heck.

All drivers are installed, device manager shows it is working and enabled.
The weird thing is software freezes on my big AMD machine but video capture device worked. And on my little AMD machine software works perfect, never freezes but I cannot get video signal??

I have uninstalled, re-installed drivers a couple of time with no results.

[Sinster]

When it freezes are you getting any Hard drive activity? How much space do you have free on your hard drive? If you don't have enough space it won't buffer correctly.

[Sinster]

What happens if you try and capture live video? Using it as a web cam?

[jonesy]

I don't have a lot of extra cash to spend or I would have gotten something nicer. I have one more computer at my old office still I have not tried it on.

All my camera has is an female 1/8" stero jack marked audio/video, and I have a cable with 1/8" male stereo jack and on the other end is red and white RCA plugs. The USB device has 3 rca jacks and some strange round pin connector.

I got clear video and audio last night using it between freezes?

I am just using USB ports in back of my motherboard.

[jonesy]

Originally Posted by Sinster

What happens if you try and capture live video? Using it as a web cam?

Software will capture live video, but I have not tried that yet.

[jonesy]

Originally Posted by Sinster

When it freezes are you getting any Hard drive activity? How much space do you have free on your hard drive? If you don't have enough space it won't buffer correctly.

Hmm, I have two drives on the one that freezes. One has tons of room (40G), other has operating system on it with maybe 10G to spare.

[Sinster]

Originally Posted by jonesy

Hmm, I have two drives on the one that freezes. One has tons of room (40G), other has operating system on it with maybe 10G to spare.

Open up task manager then go to performance. Arrange your windows so you can see TM and the ULead software. Then try to capture on the computer that freezes. I wonder if you are utilizing all RAM and CPU.. Do you have a single, dual, or quad core cpu?

[jonesy]

Here is ebay link to device I bought....

EasyCAP USB 2.0 VIDEO AUDIO TV DV CAPTURE ADAPTER CARD - eBay (item 180422953794 end time Oct-24-09 14:27:05 PDT)

[jonesy]

Originally Posted by Sinster

Open up task manager then go to performance. Arrange your windows so you can see TM and the ULead software. Then try to capture on the computer that freezes. I wonder if you are utilizing all RAM and CPU.. Do you have a single, dual, or quad core cpu?

It's an AMD Atholon 64, 3000+ 2.0GHZ 1 GB RAM Single processor

Performance settings are set at default: Let windows choose what is best
Should I change that to: Best performance?

[Sinster]

Originally Posted by jonesy

It's an AMD Atholon 64, 3000+ 2.0GHZ 1 GB RAM Single processor

Performance settings are set at default: Let windows choose what is best
Should I change that to: Best performance?

No! Leave everything be. You dont' have a graph in task manager.. it should look like this

[jonesy]

BTW my other machine is AMD Turbo 3200+ X COMB Series 1.49 GHZ showing 736MB of Ram. Single processor, I put that one together my self.

[jonesy]

Originally Posted by Sinster

No! Leave everything be. You dont' have a graph in task manager.. it should look like this

OK, I didn't see a graph when I checked Performance settings? Ok I went to my computer, not task manger. Yeah I have graph.

[Sinster]

When you try to capture is everything on the graph pegged out?

[jonesy]

Actually I just tried capturing video on the Atholon, graph had some spikes but it froze at 30% CPU usage ad 257mb of RAM??

It locks up so bad I have to reboot my computer to get out of it

[Sinster]

Is Windows up to date, Video card drivers, and sound card drivers.

Since you have two hard drives and one has a lot of space available try capturing the video to that HDD.. 10 Gig free is a little small for video capturing.

[jonesy]

Yeah all updates are installed, service pack 3 is on their as well. I can't take the freezing up anymore, so I am back on the AMD Turbo. Gonna give it another try, at least the software works on that machine. Thanks for your help bro

[Byron999]

What file format does that camera record in? file incompatibilty issues? is it analog?

Do both computers have the same type/speed USB port types(USB1, USB2 etc.)

There sounds like incompatibilties in drivers, file formats, etc..


I own one of these "Canopus ADVC100 Digital Video Converter" devices and it sure made life easier trying to get my stuff to work. I have Mini DV cameras and use Sony Vegas 5 editing soft. But have found this little jewel, "Canopus ADVC100", its an older model, but really works great (can be found used on ebay). Plug camera(analog, Digital doesn't matter) then outputs Digital or analog.

Canapus also makes file conversion software, expensive (I got a hacked version so the price was right) but invaluable to change source file formats to any other video format to faciltate destination format needs. In other words, video editing software, and compositing software seem to fucntion better working with avi format, but files are then HUGE. And the resulting rendered file is huge, to big fore the internet, so then you convert the huge avi file into internet friendly formats, or DVD mpeg2, etc...

I know I spent some time learning all this, but I have some sophisticated editing and compositing software that was prolevel and required alot of study to get it to work together seamlessly. Then once I got the hang of it, I lost interest in it.

[jonesy]

The camera is 8mm tape, so I believe it is analog so it reads AVI on capture software. Not sure about the USB ports etc.

Seems like every time I tackle something new on the computer like this video editing I have to learn 10 other things in the process.
One of the the guys at the computer store here in town may be able to help me sort this out.

[Sinster]

I still would try capturing it on the 40gb free HDD..

The 10gb is small to capture.. Out of the 10GB Window is going to use some of it for page file.

[jonesy]

Ok, I will see what I can do about changing that. BTW I checked my performance graph on the Turbo AMD and when I was running the video capture software and graph was flat lined at 100% (but it never froze up??)

Thanks again for all your help.

[LoKi]

Sounds like you have a memory leak. Try updating your video card drivers *not the capture device, but your system video*. If it's NVIDIA go to their site and let it detect your hardware and pick the best driver.

[jonesy]

I will give that a try when I get time. Thanks Loki