How to fix "dropped frames" with USB 3.0 or 2.0 cameras.

A dropped frame is a frame your camera fails to deliver in time. The most common cause is running out of USB bandwidth: a USB camera is limited by how much data the USB bus can carry, and anything that competes for that bandwidth can push it over the limit.

Symptoms

• The camera live preview appears “choppy”

• A captured video clip has many frames that are duplicated.

• The camera “advanced settings” window lists a large number of dropped frames

Explanation

A USB camera is usually limited by the amount of bandwidth available on the USB bus. USB 3.0 has much higher bandwidth than USB 2.0, which is why it’s possible to use more than one camera on a laptop with USB 3.0, though the same bandwidth limits still apply.

For the full list of causes, including other USB devices competing for bandwidth, the computer’s power-saving idle state, and multi-GPU laptops, see USB3 camera troubleshooting: Dropped frames .

Solutions

• Lower the “pixel clock” in the camera “Advanced Settings”, if this works but results in a significantly lowered frame rate please try the other solutions below.

• Ensure you do not have any other (active) USB devices connected, such as a webcam.

• Enable the “disable CPU idle states” setting. This setting can be found in the application “IDS Camera manager” under the “Additional Functions” button/dialog. Other camera manufacturers have similar functionality.

• Change the “power profile” in Windows, see this article: ../account-setup/optimize-laptop.md