Hi everybody,
I have a SanDisk 1 GB and my freakin' camcorder lags sometimes. I thought that maybe the speed of writing on the MMC is not big enough but when I put mp3's on it via card reader with Total Commander I see a speed around 2.5-3 MB/s. Video bitrate is aroud 700kB/s so whatta hell is happening?😡 I killed all the processes I don't use, RAM is 30 MB free... what should I do to have 15 fps?? Sometimes I have 15 fps, sometimes 11 or even less.
Hi Ratza!
I have exactly the same problem. Bought a 1gb mmc on ebay, don't remember the brand though.
I noticed first that copying data took longer than with the original nokia mmc and I discovered just yesterday that my video camera starts lagging when recording in high quality.
Guess that's the price when going cheap on ebay.
I bought mine's from Mediamarkt, Germany for 44 euros. The same memory, but made by Nokia was 89 euros 😮 Hmmm... what would I choose?
My N70 with 1Gb ATP card, and no problems!
I've also got a SanDisk 1GB and after reading reviews on video performance on this site (and considering that the card is rated by the manufacturer at sufficient read/write speeds), suspect that this is probably down to the MPEG4 encoding and not writing speed i.e. fast pans, low light, etc. will cause more judder.
With MPEG, small changes in a frame (e.g. movement of the main subject) are require less bits than e.g. a scene change. As a test, try the N70 on a steady base (e.g. table) filming a moving subject in bright light. If you get 15fps for this and not on more complex video, could be the processor being busier encoding?
Actually the jerky choppy video is to do with the read/write rate of the memory card you have in your device.
If you want smooth video in high quality setting there is a work-around but it limits your recording time. In your camera settings, choose Phone memory as the memory in use. Then record a clip. You will notice that the video is far more smoother. This is because footage is written to the the phone memory very fast without delay.
You will probably not be able to record more than a few minutes, before your memory becomes full. You should then transfer the clip to your storage card, and this will allow you to record a further clip.
A bit long-winded maybe, but the video quality and playback smoothness makes up for it!
In theory, if you were to get a faster card with high transfer read write speeds, the video should record smoothly on it too, but at the moment I haven't come across one which allows the smooth recording. I have heard people mention ATP and Transcend cards are supposed to be fast, but i don't have personal experience of them, so can't comment.
Yeah, that's the way I'm using my camcorder. 5 minutes for recording and another 4 or 5 to move the video to the card. Anyway, the quality is excellent.
OK, it seems that the old v2.0536 firmware was the problem. After updating to the v5.0638, the video runs smooth when capturing on the MMC. The only problem is that after recording/taking pictures the photo-video task remains on and it drains the battery faster. The process must be killed with FExplorer or a task manager after each use of the camera to save some power. Camera's viewfinder will start a little bit slower after that - remains your option what you want more: either a faster starting camera, or a battery which lasts more.