Home | Tips and Tricks | MovieMaker 2.0 | Improving capture performance

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Capturing video onto your computer’s hard drive can be frustrating. That’s because digital video from your camcorder is very large (a single minute takes up 200 megs of space) and not every system can handle the sustained capture speeds needed to transfer your movie over a firewire cable and onto a hard drive.

Fortunately, if you are running Movie Maker 2 then you already have Windows XP installed on your computer. Most computers that come bundled with Windows XP are already powerful enough to capture, even if they have slow processor speeds. For example, I commonly capture and edit video on my 600mhz laptop XP computer and never run into any problems with video capture.

However, if you do run into problems during capturing, there are several things you can do to speed up your system:

1. Defragment your hard drives
   Defragmenting a drive is an easy performance enhancer, and you should defragment regularly. You see, a hard drive is really a circular platter (kind of like a CD). Data is written onto this platter in a circular pattern, and each hard drive platter can only hold a set amount of data. Data is constantly written and erased throughout this entire platter, and any single file may be broken up into many little sectors throughout the disk. This isn’t normally a problem, though it can slow your system down over time as it takes longer to find and open files.
   
   
   
   However, this can be a major problem with large video files, as these files will have to be split into smaller fragments as they are being written, and this slow-down can make your drive prone to dropped frames. When you defragment your drive, all the broken fragments are placed together, so that your hard drive has a large "physical area" of available space to write your video to.
   
   
2. Get a faster hard drive
   The main hurdle to capturing big video files is the speed of your hard drive. You see, when you stream video onto your computer through a firewire cable, the digital video is written onto your hard drive as large a DV-AVI file. This stream runs at a constant 200 megs per minute and if your hard drive slows down while this stream is running, you will loose some of your video and get “dropped frames”. These dropped video frames are bad, as all the video after that will be out of sync.
   
   While most hard drives run very fast, some are faster than others, and they do slow down at times. To avoid hard drive “hiccups” you should close down any background programs, and you may need to invest in a faster 7200 rpm hard drive.
   
   
3. Partition your Drive as NTFS
   If your hard drive shipped with Windows XP, is should already be partitioned as NTFS. To check, find your drive inside of “My computer” and right-click on it with your mouse. If your drive is partitioned in the older Fat16 or Fat32 format, than this is your most likely culprit for capture problems. The older partition structure isn’t optimized for video capture, and won’t let you capture video files over a certain size (2 or 4 gigs).
   
   
4. Get a second hard drive
   You can greatly improve your editing system by adding another hard drive that is used solely for video capture, and most professional editors have systems with many drives. This way, your computer can use your main drive to handle running programs, and the second drive strictly for video capture. If you do a lot of editing, you’ll need another drive anyway, as your videos will quickly fill up all your available storage space.
   
   
5. Use the Windows Media Codec
   If you can’t get rid of dropped frames when capturing in the DV-AVI format, you can always try capturing in MovieMaker’s WMV9 codec. Because this format generates small file sizes, you are not going to run into dropped frames from an underperforming hard drive. However, the compression itself might be tasking on your CPU because encoding video takes a lot of processing power. Most of the time, you can capture video at the highest setting (high quality 720x480) without any problems.
   
   
6. Turn your preview monitor off
   When you capture video, you can watch the video capture on your computer inside Movie Maker’s preview monitor. However, generating this “preview video” is tasking on your system and it really isn’t necessary as you can watch your captured video directly on your camcorder’s LCD screen. You can turn the preview mode off inside the capture wizard.
   
   
   
   
7. Decrease your monitor display settings
   Try setting your display to a lower resolution (1024 x 768 is Movie Maker’s minimum recommendation but you can go lower if you need to) and decrease your color depth to 16 million (or “high color”).

As you can see, there are many things you can do to tweak your system for maximum performance and some are cheaper than others. Fortunately, once you get your video onto your computer, you are pretty much home free as it doesn’t take a lot of processing power to actually edit the video.

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