Ok, so I plugged in 4 of my cameras to my pc tower - two in the front and two in the rear. Set up for calibration and all of a sudden it started to drop frames - a lot of frames. Since I didn't want to lose fps I dropped down to 320x240. I have a quad core I-5 with 1 TB internal HDD, 500 GB external, 6 gigs of DDR 3 ram, and an Nvideo 2TB graphics card.

Should I get an additional usb controller? Never had this happen to me before.

Thanks gang.

Pat

Is it dropping frames during recording or just during 'idle'? If it's during 'idle', you can ignore the reading as Recorder only fully takes over when it's actually recording.

If that's not it, it might be a bandwidth issue, i.e., too many cameras per controller or the destination drive isn't not fast enough. For four cameras, I've had success with a SATA 3 6GB drive, a miniature eSATA (SATA 2) RAID, and an internal SSD (which is what I use now). I'm not sure a single standard SATA 2 is fast enough for four cameras at full res and speed but I can't confirm this (it's been a long time since I tried that configuration.)

Are you recording to a non-system drive? Unless it's an SSD, recording to the system drive generally isn't recommended.

Hope this helps.

G.

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Hey G,

I thought maybe it was a controller issue, but I've never had this problem before. It's dropping frames the moment I hit record. Also, I'm recording to the system drive. I'll record to the external and see if that makes a difference. What do you think?

Pat

If you've never had it happen before then it could be because your system is now utilizing the drive at the same time you're trying to record to it. I'm not sure using the external will help, but I've never tried that so, hopefully, it can solve your problem.
Essentially, you want a nice big fat pipe to get the data from the cameras to an uninterrupted, fast writing harddrive. I'd probably try out a RAM drive before getting an extra controller, but I'm also curious if your external can handle the data.
Good luck.

Thanks guys :) Ill try both tonight - Ram and external and see what happens. If you see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas U.S.A, then you know my PC is fried :)

Pat

hello Pat
on my workstation i have raid 0 SATA for video, capture etc.. i need to have 50 mB/s
and i have another data disk single SATA.
i tried to record three camera , at 60 fps on these disk
i had drop frames

on Raid no problem.

Wow. Really? Ok then. Raid it is! Hahahaha. Thanks guys.