Mini DV video captured with Windows Movie Maker Skips?

Chances are that it is the computer.

1) Laptops were not designed to be video editing workstations. That said, most of them now have fast CPUs where it is possible to do that, but

2) You need more RAM and

3) Since you are in the Windows environment, it is possible that the hard drive needs to be defragmented.

4) The graphics card is not something you need to worry about - the rendering happens in the CPU.

Have you rendered the video out as a finished project? Play that in another computer and see what heppens. Have you rendered out the finished project and burned a DVD playable on a regular DVD player connected to a TV? How does that playbacK?

Here is my theory:

You have had the laptop for a couple of years and there is not very much available hard drive space left. That means the Operating System probably does not have any room for virtual memory (because the amount of ram you have is a bit short). In the meantime, what little space there is on the hard drive is very fragmented and that means the hard drive heads are doing unecessary work to have to either use whatever existing space there is for virtual memory or try to get to the video to play-back. The results are the symptoms you are reporting.

I suggest you offload the video projects to an external drive. Clean up the internal drive, defrag the internal drive, and shut down all other applications when you are doing your video work.

NEVER get to less than 10% of available hard drive space on ANY hard drive. Ever.

If you can afford it and the computer allows, increase the RAM to at least 2 gig.

Your computer is perfectly fine for video editing. Full HD video can be edited on your system without problem. Our portable editing system is a laptop with a 2.16 processor and 1gb of RAM capable of handling of capturing, editing, and exporting 1920x1080 high definition video.

During video capture, the video passes through your processor to assemble the video signal into a video format for saving to the hard drive, and the video passes the processor again to convert the format to a video display signal so you can see the process on your computer screen. The exporting process is very similar but converts format to display, displays the video, and converts display to format (all three processes) at once - very heavy on processor and ram. This is why it can 3-5 times longer to export video. For comparison, playing a video only requires one pass through the processor from storage format to display, and this is fairly smooth since you are not trying to save the video or reformat it while watching it.

Absolutely no other programs should be running when capturing or editing videos. Also disconnect all unnecessary devices such as MP3 players and the internet. You can leave your external hard drive connected if you need it for video. Every extra device connected to the computer requires a little bit more computing power to keep track of its connection in your operating system and constantly maintain power for the line from your computer bus. Checking your email and surfing the internet keeps interrupting the capture and editing process to gain access to the processor for assembling html and php code or takes away ram for displaying images and video. The drop in ram slows down the video process which is not always terrible, but the constant interruption on your processor chops the video.

Video capture and video editing (especially the exporting process) requires priority high speed access to your processor and memory. It does not require as much processing speed or ram as a high-end game, but it requires constant high speed access to what you have. Better processors and more ram will only speed up the video conversion process. You would still have the same problem on a high end computer system if you did not turn off and disconnect all unnecessary devices and programs while capturing and editing video.

- Reply to your edit second it:

The hard drive light just means the hard drive is running. It is supposed to run a lot during capture.

* and make sure that automatic services won't start during capture or rendering such as screen saver, defrag, and cleanup.

* also make sure this computer is not acting as a server. disconnect it from your network so other computers can't interrupt it. (turn off you wireless networking, bluetooth, and disconnect the ethernet cable)

With the greatest respect to Little Dog, I don't think you've got a problem with the amount or RAM - 1.5 GByte is more than enough to play a video, and I'm doubtful about fragmentation being a problem (but it'll cost nothing to try defragging).

My first thought was that you don't have DMA enabled on your drives, but I'd have expected problems with the video capture if that was the case. Again, it'll cost nothing to check it.