I have to admit that I don't share your problem. It is true that Windows hacks big video captures up into 2GB chunks for reasons that are no doubt historical. But I have a firewire Mini-DV deck as my input, a 250GB USB 2.0 disk with an NTFS file system (64k clusters) as my output, and Premiere Pro as my capture software, and no problem capturing or any dropped frames with an Athlon XP 3000+. I do tend to go in and kill unnecessary processes before starting any video capture. Once you look at a Windows registry-access tracer, you realize how easy it is for innocent-looking "background" processes to throw a monkey wrench into a real-time operation like video capture.
When I did experience problems, it was pilot error: I had my sixteen skillion USB devices configured so that one could slow down the others, thus preventing the capture drive from keeping up with the tape data. When I fixed that (by plugging my USB hard drive directly into the motherboard USB 2.0 connector), the problems went away, in fact the disk seems to have much more bandwidth than the tape can throw at it. If you're capturing to an IDE drive, I can think of several reasons why it could fail to keep up, all fixable. I think it's a good idea to capture to a dedicated drive with large clusters and an unshared cable.
By the same token, I have no problem capturing video with the same DV firewire deck daisy chained through a 7200rpm 120GB firewire disk attached to an Apple 1GHZ Titanium Powerbook G4 with 1MB memory and Final Cut Pro. I've even tried small files on the laptop's 4200rpm internal IDE disk, and not seen a problem, but I haven't tried anything like an hour's worth and would definitely not want to rely on that internal disk for video work.
To be "fair and balanced", I think that if you configure Win XP carefully with enough CPU and memory and make sure peripherals aren't tripping over each other, it will do what you want even with the file choppin'.
--QS |
