AIW MPEG2 captures - dropped frame information
 

I've been capturing some commercial PAL VHS releases in MPEG2 format using an AIW 9800 and mmc 9.02 and Lordsmurfs settings, mainly as a tryout for workflows before embarking on my family VHS captures.
I suspect the addition of a TBC would help reduce this (I've asked for advice on another thread) but despite the the CPU use very rarely going above 15% during capturing, the mmc shows dropped frames in some of the captures, some as low as 14 while capturing a typical 2 hour film, some running into thousands.
What I was wondering though was if the dropped frame information, as displayed in mmc, is saved in the capture files or if there is software that can analyse a file for dropped frames.
Is this information lost at the end of a capture or can it be regained?

Are you capturing to a dedicated video drive, not a partition, and not where Windows resides? (C:)
It sounds like an I/O issue, if the CPU has no spikes.

It's not easy to see where dropped frames are, no.

Yep capturing to a seperate dedicated 1tb drive.
So I need to make sure I write down with pen and paper the dropped frame information and there is no way to analyse the files after capture?

-- merged --

Is there a point during or after a capture that you discard a file because of the number of dropped frames?
For my initial tests using commercial tapes I've just been capturing without playing the file back, then loading up to capture another.
I'm assuming that when mmc says there are 14 dropped frames from a 2 hour capture I'm not going to notice a difference, but when there are hundreds or thousand the viewing experiance is not going to be pleasant!
Are some tapes just not going to be able to be captured without dropped frames?

Part of this was answered here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...dge-video.html

As far as 14 drops in 2 hours, it depends on if the frames are staggered across 2 hours, or all at once. Even dozen of drops will be noticed. Hundreds or thousands is a garbage capture. Dump it, try again.

The drive may fragmentation issues. Windows defrag does nothing for it -- it may be metadata. You'd need DisKeeper or PerfectDisk for that. Or just format it. See what SMART says about the drive, Is it healthy? (I use the pro version of HD Tune for testing my drives. It has several speeds tests, plus it shows SMART data.)