To avoid dropouts (lost frames) during video capture your system has to be
optimized, both the hardware and the software:
Virtual Memory does expand the memory, but decreases the speed of the
computer:
VM writes the content of the RandomAccessMemory onto harddrive which is much
slower. This option should be disabled in the system settings.
the memory area of the harddrives is getting fragmented during the normal
work. This means, that your files are not as one piece on your disk. Thatīs why
you should defragment your harddrive before your video capture. This will
increase the performance of the drives immensly.
Always use your fastest harddrive for capturing. The busmastering should be
also enabled. Win98 does this by default. If you are using Win95 you should
download the busmaster drivers from your motherboard manufacturer.
You should close all other applications that are running in the background
due their negative behaviors to the drive performance. Especially if you have
running caching programs like findfast. These programs have the task to cache the
most needed data into the RAM. So if the system needs the informations it can
read them from the much faster RAM. During capturing no data is read from the
harddrive.
If you are working in an network you should disable networkaccess to your
drives.
Choose a YUV colorspace (YUY2,UYVY, or something like that). Working in RGB
mode is much slower.
If you are using a graphics gard with video I/O, or a TV card (both donīt have
hardware acceleration) you should begin with a small resolution like 320*240.
If you do not have dropped frames you can increase the resolution, to find the
best possible resolution that works on your system. Be sure you always use a
resolution that is dividable by 16.
You can simply choose a high sample rate for audio since the audio stream is
not that big. F.e. 44100Hz, 16 Bit, stereo.
NOTE: Some of the tips could be only for advanced users.