Hi Gerry,
It has been a while since I captured DV from my Canon.
How old is your camera? There have been reports of Firewire control faults by some editors leading them to be unable to capture.

I'm wondering what you're selecting.

Your system certainly should be powerful enough for DV.

Dafydd

Its a Canon Optura 200MC. The PD9 software controls and captures the audio and video just not well at times. I feel that the problem is the processes that are run in Windows. Nothing significant is going on except running PD9 and trying to capture the video I took with the Canon.

It will work just fine then I'll notice my CPU usage going way up for no apparent reason. Then the video portion slows or stops and there is considerable static on the audio. It may last 20 to 120 seconds then CPU usage drops and all is fine until the next episode occurs.

Having done a lot of reading on this it is a universal problem that really isn't due entirely to PD9, I believe, but on the other hand makes it unusable for those who have to get video via their camcorder. It is partially the PD9's fault since its CPU usage jumps up and down without doing anything extra except capturing.

I was hoping that someone else who experienced this problem would have some suggestions on what to do. Eliminating as many processes as possible might be the solution but I don't want to eliminate the crucial ones. For example, I think svchost.exe and System Idle Process are crucial.

notebooks usually have "slow" 5400 rpm disks, and windows has two cache schemes, "delayed" write of buffers being the usual default. The sudden cpu increase could be windows houskeeping (dumping buffers and swap files at same time) try defragging disc, turn off delayed write to the disk and turn off pagefile. I have same camera and use PD9, it captures fine. But i am on a desktop with SATA III (6 mb/s, 64MB cache) drives. If you have an external USB drive (turn off indexing service), try downloading DV to that. RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB GDDR6
(2 NVME 2TB, 1 SSD 2TB, 3SATA 18TB )
PD18 ULTIMATE 64bit
WINDOWS 10 PRO 64 BIT
GIGABYTE X570 AORUS PRO WIFI MB
RYZEN 7 3700X 8-CORE , 64 GB DDR4
ORSAIR HX1050 watts PSU

also after thought, disconnect internet, turn off any spyware screening software ... most will try to do an inspection of the file as it comes in, this can mess up capture. RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB GDDR6
(2 NVME 2TB, 1 SSD 2TB, 3SATA 18TB )
PD18 ULTIMATE 64bit
WINDOWS 10 PRO 64 BIT
GIGABYTE X570 AORUS PRO WIFI MB
RYZEN 7 3700X 8-CORE , 64 GB DDR4
ORSAIR HX1050 watts PSU

Not topic related, but could I please ask Gerry863 only to use standard-size text when posting, as myself and many others who view these pages from various mobile devices, find the bold text makes it difficult to peruse the postings easily. Thanks. Trevor . . My YouTube site . . (Bristol, UK) . . My JVC GZ-HM1 Camcorder

I had defragged the disk, The disk rpms are 7200. I had turned off internet and spyware detection. I will try the other suggestions once I figure out how to do them. Thanks

Sorry about the bold print.

So,
How much, minutes, seconds are you able to record before this problem occurs?
Is it saving as MPG-2 ?
What size was the file when it crashed?
What disk space was available?
Did PD continue or freeze or throw an error?

If you don't actually record but have the PD screen show the image from the camera and just leave it displaying but not writing, does it occur after the same time (again, How long a time is it?)

Just out of interest I will reproduce by recording some myself and see what happens.

If you can't solve the problem - Change the problem

I just recorded 1.19Gb of MPG-2 video using the PD9 Capture from DV Device (my Sony camera)
Runtime 20 mins 25 secs
Bitrate 7.6MBPS
29.97fps

During recording I played back an FLV video caught in the camera field of view along with the capture disk info
Also captured a shot of live Taskmanager showing memory params and processes etc. Yes CPU usage jumped up and down all the time, very spiky. Understandable since I was also playing FLV in a viewer while recording, though stopping the FLV did not hardly affect CPU useage.

Will save this mpeg video for a while in case we want to take another look, but it seems for me with a clone pc running Vista Home edition and 4Gb ram it was working OK

Had to remove the DV Tape from the camera or after 2 mins the camera switched off, With no tape the camera feeds DV signal fine for as long as its on.






If you can't solve the problem - Change the problem

The sudden cpu increase could be windows houskeeping (dumping buffers and swap files at same time) try defragging disc, turn off delayed write to the disk and turn off pagefile. I have same camera and use PD9, it captures fine. But i am on a desktop with SATA III (6 mb/s, 64MB cache) drives. If you have an external USB drive (turn off indexing service), try downloading DV to that.

I have always felt that what you mentioned was the culprit so I tried turning off pagefile as suggested. It worked! Thank you Rocket-Scientist and others who contributed to helping solve my dilemma. It was with trepidation that I did so because when I Googled how to do it almost everyone said don't do it. A few gamers, however, said that they did so with great results and they have never turned it back on.

For those, like me who had no idea how to turn off pagefile I have enclosed some directions as to how to do it in Vista. It is probably similar in other versions of Windows.

Start Button -> Control Panel -> System-applet -> Advanced System Setting-task -> Advanced-tab -> Performance Settings...-button -> Advanced-tab -> Virtual Memory Change...-button (phew).
Untick "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"
Select "No paging file" for all drives. Click Set button.

While doing this I noticed that under Performance settings you could also select Visual Effects tab and I selected the button "Adjust for best performance" which I did also. The windows don't look as good nor does the typeface but I didn't care. I might trying selecting whatever the default was and seeing if my video capturing still works.