I purchased this camera last thurday I think. Well of course I've done alot of recording, and I planned on backing up the video to DVD. It writes to a DV tape. Well, I have it hooked up to my computer through IEE 1394, and it all seemed great for a while, but I'm getting laggy video recording in various spots. I don't have some dream machine 3.4ghz processor, with 2 gigs of RAM. I'm running An AMD Sepron 2800+ @1.6 ghz, with 512mgs or RAM. Is my computer too slow to handle this digital video recording? I also have a stand-alone LG DVD burner that has a DV (IEE 1394 in), so I hooked my camcorder up to that and recorded my video that way, well it worked fine, but I like the video editing/menus/themes etc that I can create when I capture it on my desktop. I'm just not sure if it's my HD's not fast enough, my RAM's too slow, my CPU? I even went in and made sure all my background apps were off (including firewall, antivirus etc). Windows movie maker let me disable video playback (for slower systems), but it still lagged some. Any insight would be great thanks.
I don't know what program you are using to do the transfer but I would recommend one of the free capturing utilities that don't take any resources on your machine. Here you will find a collection of free capture utilities: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/downloads/freedownloads.php I suggest to try WinDV. Pay attention to the bottom line: it will report if frames are dropped during the tranfer. If no frames are dropped you have perfect quality. If you see a lot of dropped frames, check out section 4 of this page: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/transfer.php In any case, also on your machine, you should be able to have 0 dropped frames.
I'm still dropping frames and I don't know what the deal is. I'm getting a New Video Card in today, Geforce FX5500 256MB, I doubt that will help anything at all, but who knows... So even running windv, I dropped frames. Why could that be? Is my HD not fast enough?? It's pretty freaking old. It's been through.. hmm, 5 computers now.. I just switch it over when I build a new one. Any other idea on what could be causing these dropped frames??