jjn, this will be a rather long message but to respond to your question I decided perhaps it would be helpful to describe what I am trying to do.

My wife and I are in our 70’s and over the years we have accumulated ~650 VCR tapes. Each of these tapes have 3 or 4 movies on them. I have many boxes of tapes and recognize that VCR units are becoming a thing of the past. I could either trash the tapes, hope that I could maintain a VCR player, or convert those movies to digital formats. Another option would be to purchase the movies, but we have already invested time in recording and I know that many of them were not popular enough to still be stocked by merchants. We stopped recording tapes ~10 years ago, so many of the titles are no longer recognized by us. I have tried over the years to maintain an Access database so that we know what there is in those boxes.

The process that I have been using is for the Desktop computer to convert an entire tape to a digital file format. This means that I can turn it on and do other things for ~ 6 hours. Then use the Laptop computer to extract, edit and save each movie. I am in a little bit of a dilemma on the format that I should use for saving. I have decided to use the MPEG2 format since it is so embedded in the VCR/TV world that it will probably be long-lived. I understand that there are now storage devices that can be networked to TVs where we could store all of these movies. So I am kind of straddling the fence by putting them all on DVDs but when I find one that we really liked, I am also storing it on a large Drive without reducing the quality caused by DVD restrictions.

Now to the Green screen problem that I will describe in 2 ways – Old Process and Now Process.

Old Process was using MovieBox 510-USB for conversion to digital format (settings were Preset-DVD and Screen Detect -On). This consisted of using Pinnacle hardware and software so I tend to think of those files that were created as being Pinnacle-created. But after much thought, I don’t think that is what you meant by your question. With this process, when I was done with the Import process I had to sometimes click on Scene Detection in Album on Studio and occasionally got the green screen during the process. I was having many problems with OOS audio and video.

Now Process is using Canopus ADVC110 for conversion (settings are Preset-DV, Screen Detect -On, Stop at end of Tape -Off). It occasionally shows a few dropped frames, but I have not found any OOS conditions. I do still spot-check at 15-20 min intervals on the Timeline to be sure before I burn the DVD. I had to redo too many DVDs for OOS conditions when using the Old Process because I wasn’t spot-checking. When done with the Import process and I open Edit, the scenes are all detected. Have not had to click on Scene Detection.

This morning I had another Green screen incident and decided to document it here.

I opened Pinnacle on the Laptop and clicked on the icon in Album for a recent tape that had been converted. That tape was immediately shown as 1658 scenes. Selected 657 scenes and dragged to the Timeline. Task Manager showed an occasional spike of 30% CPU utilization. After a couple of minutes Timeline showed the frames and Preview screen was OK. Selected Save Project As. Task Mgr showed a few 30% spikes for CPU. Preview screen changed to Green when ‘task bar’ showed about 80% complete.

I am now accustomed to having to restart Pinnacle and sometimes the computer itself. My main reason for pursuing this is to find out if there is a weakness in my computer that I could fix and save myself some ‘wasted’ time. Unfortunately, I don’t understand what Pinnacle processes are using what part of the computer and becoming ‘restricted’ (if that is the problem).

I guess that in response to your question, if I understand it correctly, I am not saving Pinnacle files and reusing them. It’s kind of like a one-way street – Import tape file to Edit to Make Movie.

Thank you again for your time and interest,