Any suggestions for dropped frames with compression
 

I am using a Sony TRV-85 which has a TBC built in connected to a VC500 to VEEDUB64 to capture only using the proc amp to adjust brightness and contrast. I have zero frame drops uncompressed UYUV interleaved AVI. I only get the frame drops when I try to use huffyuv or lagraith compression. The resulting uncompressed AVI is very large and I would like to use lossless compression. I can compress after the fact but that eats disk space and adds digital manipulation to the workflow. I think this is more software related. I have a Panasonic E10 DVR that I could use in passthrough mode but leave it out because of the TBC in the camcorder. I do not have a full frame TBC. Does anybody have a recommendation for my workflow that may work better?

My computer is a Ryzen9 5950x, 32gb ram, NVME and Sata drives, Nvidia 3080ti 12gb, Diamond VC500 USB capture device. Windows 11. I use Davinci resolve for color correction, sometimes neat plugin for noise, Davinci Neural engine deinterlacing (can't get QMTG to work it does not like the vid format and have not tried to covert) I have used Topaz VAI for upscaling clean color corrected deinterlaced captures, not really pleased with their deinterlacing yet.

My guess is what will be recommended is to invest in a full frame TBC. Looks like you have invested in everything else, so might as well not skimp there.

There are sub-$300 rack mount TBCs out there that likely will work better than not having one at all, especially if you're having frame drops. Certainly doesn't look to be your PC is causing the drops given how advanced the specs are, so that would suggest that the frames are not coming in at a stable enough rate and the capture card is most likely choking due to non-tolerance of timebase errors. I haven't seen a great head-to-head comparison of recommended vs non-recommended TBCs though to really suggest which one to go with though if you're on a budget.

You could also try a more timebase error tolerant capture card, others may have some suggestions on those.

Not always, some (many?) of these are defective, which means they may add extra noise, dot crawl, or other issues that were never there to begin with. I took a shot on a random one of these from eBay and returned it (it was from store, so luckily they had a return policy).

My personal guess is that since you only get the dropped frames when using lossless compression, but no issues if capturing uncompressed, then it might be something related to the PC side/settings/vdub, not the analog workflow (card/camcorder).

Increase the chunk size and number of buffers under Capture> disk IO (in virtualDub), this may help, also sth else might be using the CPU while you are capturing therefore resulting in dropped frames. Disable the internet during capture.

I have not tested Windows 11 enough to say the OS side is innocent, check the task manager while capturing to see the resources' usage and try to find the bottleneck.

> (can't get QMTG to work it does not like the vid format and have not tried to covert)

probably sth as trivial as :

will work (if color space is your issue)