Capture Files
Hi,
I have a FAST MM Pro with M-JPEG bundle and I use Adobe Premier 4.0.
Last night I began serious video capture efforts to build a movie of our son's
wedding almost two years ago. I'm fortunate in that at times there were 3
video cameras going, so I ought'a have fun with transitions!
Anyway, I have a very fast setup, but I'm still dropping frames.
About avery 5-10 seconds the disk makes a seek and return seek. I can barely
hear it, but it happens. Shortly afterwards, we drop a frame.
After a while, the disk makes a MAJOR interruption, and we drop about 18
frames. There's been nothing on the 2 GB disk partition, so it's not
fragmented. This happens frequently – at regular intervals.
Between these periods of significant disk activity, the drop rate is about a
frame in 800, which doesn't bother me. Maybe it should. These dropped frames
fall out at about the 5-10 second interval mentioned above.
At lunch today, a buddy and I were discussing this and he mentioned
pre-allocating the file. Bingo! I remember reading about this somewhere,
perhaps in the FAST MM Pro or Adobe Docs.
The questions are, has someone written a program that pre-allocates a capture
file? I can write one, but there's no sense in reinventing the wheel!
What does Movie Capture do when it's pointed to an existing file? Does it
simply write on top of it – which is the correct answer? Or does it delete it
and create a new file of the same name?
When I stop a capture, and it was to a capture file, what does Movie Capture do
about marking the end of file? My plan would be to write a program that would
give me the option of allocating, and zeroing out, disk space based upon time
(and expected capture ratios), or on size (MB), or fill the disk! If I write a
100MB capture file, and Movie Capture only uses 75MB, does Movie Capture "close
up" the file and release the unused space at the end?
The settings I'm using for capture follow:
FAST's Movie Capture Settings
Frame Rate: 30
Capture Audio: On
Video:
Image Size
1/2
320×240
Keep Aspect Ratio: ON
Compression:
Compression Ratio: 16:1
Audio:
Sample Size
8 Bit
Channels
Stereo
Frequency
22 KHz
Bill Metzger