[ender]

I've owned a Formace Studio for about a year, and at first it worked wonderfully. I was able to convert old VHS tapes to DV (w/iMovie) without a problem last summer.

It's been awhile since I've used it, but I tried today and am having all sorts of problems. Both iMovie and Formac's TVR software suffer massive numbers of dropped frames. Both the video and audio are messed up. (If I use Formac's audio only tool, the audio comes in just fine.) It's almost as if my system can't keep up with the DV stream, but hardware-wise I've got the same set-up I had last summer (see below). I managed to get one half-hour tape segement converted after several attempts, but since then the problem has gotten worse. I've tried all sort of things to get it to work: logged in as different user, used different boot disk, ran Norton Utilities, repaired permissions, etc).

I am wondering if something in Apple's updates (iMovie, QuickTime, etc) has changed and is causing the problem. To the best of my knowledge, I've got the latest versions of everything including Formac's TVR software. Here's my specs:

Beige G3 w/Sonnet Encore ZIF G4 500 MHz
Sonnet Tempo Trio USB/Firewire/ATA133 PCI card
2 Maxtor ATA 133 hard drives
ATI Radeon 7000 PCI Mac Edition
Mac OS X (10.2.8) and all latest Apple updates to iMovie, QuickTime, etc
Formac TVR version 1.2

[Uncle Skeleton]

how much hard drive space do you have (on boot and capture volumes) and when was the last time you defragged/reformatted? and, I assume you're not running anything in the background (or foreground) while capturing, and have all manner of sharing turned off? I used to get lots of dropped frames from my Dazzle bridge just from light web surfing and (lighter) IMing while trying to capture, and that was on a 1ghz G4.

[ender]

I've got about 4 GB free on both of the boot partitions I tried (two different drives). The partitions I was capturing to both had at least 30 GB free. The second drive was a fresh initialize/install about two weeks ago and hasn't really been used since, so fragmentation should be minimal. Also, the jerky play/dropped frames happens even when I'm simply playing the video in iMovie or Formac TVR (ie, not capturing to the hard drive).

Process Viewer says there is nothing else running taking up more than 1/2% CPU time, I've disabled all start-up items and unplugged all other peripherals including my cable modem. I've recently moved the 2nd hard drive to the Tempo Trio card (both now on the card), but I don't see how that should matter. I'm a regular reader of several Mac news sites, and usually hear about any software conflicts from system updates.

That seems to leave: a) the Studio is malfucntioning, b) a bad Firewire cable, c) the Tempo Tri card is bad. Is there anyway I can troubleshoot this to narrow it down? I don't have a spare FW cable (iPod has a dock connector...drat!) and A and C are rather expensive fixes (there's a reason I still have a Beige! ). Are there any other possible causes I'm missing?

Thanks!!!

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
how much hard drive space do you have (on boot and capture volumes) and when was the last time you defragged/reformatted? and, I assume you're not running anything in the background (or foreground) while capturing, and have all manner of sharing turned off? I used to get lots of dropped frames from my Dazzle bridge just from light web surfing and (lighter) IMing while trying to capture, and that was on a 1ghz G4.

[Uncle Skeleton]

well, I would guess the formac is going bad, but here's what I'd do to find out. Go to your nearest Apple store or Apple reseller, with your Formac and your vcr. Hook them up to a nice new mac with a big empty hard drive and see if the problem persists. If possible, install fresh Formac/iMovie software from the web on that machine. And use one of their firewire cables

Incidentally, my Dazzle's video still works fine but the left audio channel has gone almost dead, which is very irritating, and I've since upgraded to the Televio PCI card (now sold as AlchemyTV)

[ender]

I guess with your video and my audio, we've got one complete set-up!

I think I've given up and trying to solve this without getting access to more hardware to test on. I'm going to try to round up a Mac to test the Formac on, and a digital camcorder to test my Mac on. If it is the Formac that will be unfortunate. I got it last year to convert all my tapes, but got side tracked from completing them. I was finally getting back into working on my library and now this. And from what I read on the message boards, I shouldn't hold out any hope of Formac's customer service being able to repair the unit under the warranty...if I can even get ahold of them!

Thanks for your help...

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
well, I would guess the formac is going bad, but here's what I'd do to find out. Go to your nearest Apple store or Apple reseller, with your Formac and your vcr. Hook them up to a nice new mac with a big empty hard drive and see if the problem persists. If possible, install fresh Formac/iMovie software from the web on that machine. And use one of their firewire cables

Incidentally, my Dazzle's video still works fine but the left audio channel has gone almost dead, which is very irritating, and I've since upgraded to the Televio PCI card (now sold as AlchemyTV)

[ender]

I did some more experimenting last night looking for a more portable video source than my VCR so I could test the Formac at the Apple Store and found that it worked fine again! After several more hours of testing I came to a conclusion. This particular batch of tapes I was trying to convert are very old and suffer serious degradation (trying to archive them before they get any worse!). The worst part of the video is outside of the "TV safe" zone, so it looks OK on a TV. Appartently, the Formac has to have a fairly clean video source, otherwise it chokes.

I would have thought as long as the VCR was outputing a legitimate signal, the converter should just convert what it gets. But even if I output from my VCR over RF cable to my TV, and then hookup the Formac to the AV outs on the TV (thinking the RF-to-composite converstion might result in a more stable signal), the same result happened.

Have you experienced any similar problems with your Dazzle or with the AlchemyTV units?

Thanks!

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
well, I would guess the formac is going bad, but here's what I'd do to find out. Go to your nearest Apple store or Apple reseller, with your Formac and your vcr. Hook them up to a nice new mac with a big empty hard drive and see if the problem persists. If possible, install fresh Formac/iMovie software from the web on that machine. And use one of their firewire cables

Incidentally, my Dazzle's video still works fine but the left audio channel has gone almost dead, which is very irritating, and I've since upgraded to the Televio PCI card (now sold as AlchemyTV)

[Uncle Skeleton]

d'oh, I should have thought of that. Now that you mention it I had the exact same problem with a particularly bad tape using my Dazzle unit, but when I got the Televio it captured it just fine (tape noise included of course, but no dropped frames).

[ender]

Thanks for the feedback! At least now I know my Formac is working as well as can be expected. I guess I'll set that batch of tapes aside until I can get something else to digitize them. Hopefully they won't degrade much more before I get around to doing that.

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
d'oh, I should have thought of that. Now that you mention it I had the exact same problem with a particularly bad tape using my Dazzle unit, but when I got the Televio it captured it just fine (tape noise included of course, but no dropped frames).

[Volanges]

FYI
formac TVR's software is up to 3.04 -- not the 1.2 you are listing