Video Capturing and Editing are about the most difficult
tasks your PC will ever do.
***
Working with video requires your computer to handle large amounts of data in
"real time." The system can't put the video capture on hold while it works
on something else, like it can do while you're working in a word processor or
reading a web page. The video capture must go on *uninterrupted* or there will
be "skips" or "stuttering" in the captured video.
HARD DRIVES:
The Video Capture process saves large chunks of data on your hard drive(s).
You need very large drives, and they need to be fast.
PROCESSOR POWER:
After you've captured the video, you'll be editing it; cutting out unwanted
parts and re-assembling the clips into a "movie." This requires both a fast
and large hard drive and a fast main processor (Athlon or Pentium).
Finally, you'll probably be converting the raw video into another format
for burning onto a DVD, SVCD, VCD, etc. This is the "transcoding" process.
SYSTEM PERFORMANCE:
The entire computer works as a *system*. You may have a super-fast central
processing unit ("CPU") with lots of RAM installed, but a slow hard disk
"subsystem" will ruin the performance of video capture and editing on the PC.
When the demands of video processing push a PC system beyond its capability,
the captured video may drop an excessive amount of frames during recording.
This will result in "skips" and jittery playback in the video file.
Here's a brief summary of ways to optimize your system's performance for
getting the best possible video processing results:
* Use a fast processor (2GHz or faster) and at least 512MB of RAM.
* De-fragment the hard drive used for video capture.
(See Optimizing Hard Drive performance for details.)
* Enable DMA on the hard drive used for video capture.
(See Optimizing Hard Drive performance for details.)
* Use a separate *physical* hard drive to capture videos and store them.
This hard drive should use a different IDE channel than the drive used
for running your programs.
(See Optimizing Hard Drive performance for details.)
* If you use a SATA hard drive and your motherboard has a built-in
SATA Controller (most do), make sure you install the latest chipset and
integrated peripherals updates for your motherboard.
* Try to assign your Windows swap file and Windows "temp" directory
on a different drive from your video data. Otherwise, Windows may try
to access the hard drive while you're trying to work on a video file,
and the required "I/O throughput" may be more than the drive can handle.
* Use a minimum display resolution of 1024x768 with 16 bit color depth.
Right-click your Windows Desktop, click Properties > Settings Tab and
adjust the screen area to at least 1024x768 pixels.
* Use an AGP or PCI-e graphics card with a minimum of 32Mb of RAM on board.
* Use Windows XP and format your hard drives using the NTFS file system.
(See Optimizing Hard Drive performance for details.)
* Do not run other programs during video capture or transcoding. This allows
the CPU to devote all of its power to processing the video stream.
* Turn off energy saving features that might interrupt the video capture
process:
Right click on the Desktop, then click Properties > Screen Saver >
Power Schemes tab. Make sure everything under "Settings for Power
Scheme" is set to "Never."
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