Hello, this is my first post and I thank you kindly in advance for your time and attention.
I am trying to capture mini-DV SP footage from a Sony PD-170 via firewire, using the camera, into my HP Pavilion running Windows 8.1 64 bit. I bought a 1 TB hard 7200rpm hard drive to store the captured footage on and I run
Sony Vegas Pro 13.
I had some pixel flash and on one occasion a red flash on my footage, so I started looking into DV transfer further. My first attempt at capturing 12 minutes of footage to the C: in Vegas resulted in 164 dropped frames (and 200,000 DVAnalyzer errors). On the first attempt I was running the PD170 off of a battery and on the subsequent captures I had it plugged into DC. I do realize that with the DV-AVI format, it is simply a transfer of digital information and not a capture, but that doesn't explain my findings on subsequent capture attempts.
I found a program called DVAnalyzer which seemed to have been developed for use by archivists to detect video or audio errors that had been concealed. When I ran capture from Vegas a second time, but changed the settings to save to my second hard drive, I had no dropped frames but still had about 20,000 DVAnalyzer errors. I had almost the same result on an attempt to capture with WinDV and nearly the same results after a third capture attempt where I made sure the Windows power management settings were good and the antivirus was off. I disabled internet for all of the tests.
So, my questions are:
1. If DV-AVI transfer is a simple data transfer, why am I getting to many errors, yet managed to get 10fold less errors on subsequent attempts?
2. If I look at the time code for where the errors occur, it tends to cycle, one segment will have say 5000 errors and the next segment will have 10000, then it will trail off in subsequent frames. (Then there are several clips with no errors whatsoever).
3. Does it matter if I am getting errors with DVAnalyzer if I am not dropping frames?
4. What do you think is causing the errors and what could I reasonably be expected to do to make things the best I can with my limitations of time, money, and being stuck in a project using this old technology?
I am trying to film a documentary that I would like the world to see, but my budget forced me into what is quickly starting to feel like a nightmare - what I thought would be simple - a transfer of digital footage via a firewire 1394 connection.
My ideas:
-DV tapes are old and maybe were error prone format from the get-go 10 years ago.
-the tape head alignment in the PD170 is slightly off
-the tape in question has some form of damage
-Something on the computer is intermittently hogging resources (even though 3.something GHz processor)
-Maybe I need to buy another 8GB memory to match the 8GB in place (I find this doubtful)
-If DV is so error prone, why wouldn't it have a mode to capture at 1/2 speed with greater accuracy?
Thank you so much for reading this and any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated!
Regards,
John