audio crackling noise in playback why?

[jhatcher]

Hi guys,

Ok, I have a really strange problem going on and wondered if anyone else ever dealt with it before. I'm using win98SE, video tools 2 and premier 5.1. About every other time I capture video via firewire from my Canon GL1, there is this crackle in the audio track even when my talent is quiet. I can reboot sometimes and recapture the same clip and there won't be any problem. I am capturing in a RT2000 hardware profile to keep irq conflicts away, and also use a selective startup so nothing is running in the background. I've disabled the sound card, unplugged all audio cables running to the RT2000 card but still I keep getting these pops and crackles in my audio track. It's not my speakers either, because if I export the final project to tape, the crackles are on the tape as well. I've even turned on the enhanced rate conversion setting in premier to "Best". Does anyone have any ideas on what is causing this?

[Dr Mordrid]

Could be lots of things ranging from bus contention on an overloaded system to faults in the Canon cams audio or bad tapes.

How 'bout some system specs for starters?

Dr. Mordrid

[jhatcher]

Well, I have a PIII coppermine system with an Abit BE6II mobo, 128 megs of RAM. 3 Hard drives, 2 A/V drives all using the on board Highpoint UD66 Controllers. 1 A/V drive is 20 gigs, the second is 40, both 7200RPM, the controllers have the latest revision installed. I'm using the TI firewire driver. I'm not at the comp right now, but as I remember, I've got the RT2000 in slot 1. I have a network card as well, but it's disabled in my RT2000 hardware profile. The sound card is that Diamond MX300 with the latest driver, but I don't think that's the problem. The crackles come right out of the BOB so it's not the sound card in my opinion. As I say, I've disabled it even and still get this stuff. Defragmented and it went away on the first capture, but came right back the second capture.

I had this system up and running fine before, but tried to upgrade to win2k and video tools 3. It didn't work out so I went back to a basic ghosted system and had some sync problems so I used Matrox's uninstall untility that they sent me, reinstalled MVT2 without the SP1 and this problem has been coming and going since.

Let me know if you need more tech specs.

[mikiem]

As doc says, lot's of choices so far, but for whatever it's worth, have heard of a lot of audio problems that wound up related to via & that were fixed, so if you have any down time after posting specs, & if you have via, you might want to check there bouts.

[jhatcher]

What do you mean by "via" exactly?

[Dr Mordrid]

VIA...as in VIA chipset related problems.

VIA chipsets have lower throughput on the PCI bus along with other issues. Add these to hoggish peripherals and all manner of video and audio artifacting is possible.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 19 June 2001).]

[jhatcher]

Oh, I gotcha. Well the funny thing is that I did have everything working before without this problem several reformats and reghosting sessions before. I mean I've set my system up and reset it multiple times and had it working multiple times before with never this problem. This only started after the failed win2k upgrade and reinstall of 98SE. Well hopefully one day soon Matrox will answer me back, it's going on 40 hours now since I posted my question to them.

[KRSESQ]

The Abit BE6II is an Intel 440BX chipset, is it not?

http://homepages.tig.com.au/~mozz/abit_be6II.htm

Kevin

[jhatcher]

I suppose so. So what are you thinking might be causing my dilemma all of a sudden?

[TnT]

I have a Promise UDMA 66 card and I had crackling audio on video captured on a UDMA 66 drive until I turned them down to 33. This may be the same problem you are having. Try getting some software from the HD maker to change the UDMA setting of the drive.

[jhatcher]

Well that could be, but I've run my computer in 33 mode before without the Highpoint drivers installed and it dropped frames like crazy. Thus, it could be that the drivers need to be reinstalled. Who knows. It's an interesting idea though that I may try out.

[Dr Mordrid]

Those ATA66 scenarios sound like bus hogging causing an audio dropout. Hogging on the part of the Promise cards was an issue until the FT100 came out with its new design. The original FT33 was the worst though it could be mitigated by turning down its latency in the drivers.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enrico Ng]

I posted about a year ago that I was having the same problems when capturing with my FT66 and MarvelG400-tv. This sounds like the same problem with "bus noise" This problem was fixed in the FT100?