Prevent jerky video from Vixia HF R42 on PC

[Puparazzi]

I'm trying to take photos of dogs running at agility trials and at the dog park.  The videos are coming out horribly jerky, even when the dogs are going slow.  I get at most 2 seconds of smooth video then it pauses and jumps ahead several frames.  I've tried many different camera settings and software to download the videos to my PC.  I'm wondering if zooming is what's causing the jerkiness.  I need to be able to zoom while shooting and this is getting extremely frustrating.  

I just looked at the videos in camera and they're fine.  It seems to be a problem once they're downloaded to my Win7 64 bit PC using the Canon provided SW OR Adobe Premiere Elements 10.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Mykolas]

Hi Puparazzi!

Thank you for posting.

Playing back HD video on a computer requires a certain amount of system resources, so other systems may be much better at playing it back smoothly than others. 

1. What are the general specifications of your computer? (ie. CPU, RAM, Video Card, Hard Drive, etc.)
2. Are there any other programs running at the same time you try to play back the video?
3. Have you tried playing back the video on another computer?

If this is a time sensitive-matter, additional support options are available at Contact Us.

[VanillaMozilla]

Try recording at a different image format or with lower image quality.  That will almost certainly help.  If you have irreplaceable videos at too high quality, you may want to convert them to a format with a lower bit rate, using a video editor.

For the highest quality, the computer needs to be fairly fast (2 or 3 GHz, I would think) and recent (although you don't necessarily need a lot of memory).  Some programs are less efficient than others, therefore cannot display smoothly.  I know some of my Linux programs play smoothly and others don't.

I probably can't advise you further on programs or image formats.