I was wondering if someone might be able to help me out. I have a Sony Handycam HC40 digital video recorder connected to my desktop via FireWire. If I play the video directly to my monitor ("previewing") everything looks great - nice and smooth. This "previewing" works great with ULEAD Movie Factory 2 SE, Nero Burning Rom 5.5.10.4, and Adobe Premier 6.0 (the 3 softwares i have tried).

When I capture the video to make a DVD and play it back (before I burn the DVD), all 3 softwares show the playback as choppy/jerky. The USB 2.0 capture was about the same result (I tried that method initially but was told FireWire's throughput/speed might solve the issue).

I am wondering if my setup is powerful enough for video capture for DVD, or if something might be wrong with my setup (see below):

Windows 98 SE
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
512MB of memory (dual channel setup, I believe)
Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro motherboard

Western Digital 30GB hard drive (7200 rpm, 2 MB cache, 28+ GB available open space)
Micro Advantage DVD+/-RW Model 8DVDRW-B13 (B-13 is firmware revision??)

WD hard drive is primary master (no slave attached)
DMA is enabled (checked)

Micro Advantage DVD drive is secondary master
Disconnect, Sync Data Transfer, and DMA are all enabled (checked)

Iomega Zip 250 is secondary slave (not being used during video capture process)
Disconnect, Sync Data Transfer, Removeable and DMA are all enabled (checked)

In the BIOS setup there I cannot find any possible adjustments for the FireWire port. The motherboard and memory are set to "Turbo" mode (the fastest settings)

From what I've outlined here, any ideas??

Thanks!

What if you burn the DVD & play it on a standalone?

Sometimes playback from a hard drive can result in it looking choppy but on a DVD player it's fine.

Don't forget that once converted to DVD format the data throughput significantly increases & maybe your graphics card isn't really up to it.

Thanks! I think the graphics card is OK (Visiontek ATI-based Radeon 9100 AGP with 128MB).

Regular DVD movies and recorded DVD-R disks (from my daughter's coach) play perfectly on the computer. Are you saying if I burn what I've captured to a DVD it might play better than the captured MPEG file that's on the hard drive??

I'd say it's worth a try. Could just be that the data isn't coming off the hard drive quick enough.

Have you defragged the HD recently as that can have quite an impact?