• Creative Community Conversations

  59.94 footage stutter…

  Posted by Joe Mordecai on September 26, 2013 at 3:47 pm

  Hey all –

  I’m working on a project in FCPX with H.264 footage at 720p and 59.94fps. Whenever I play the footage in FCP, it plays normal for about three seconds and then gets really choppy and drops frames like crazy while it plays. The footage plays fine in QuickTime player and in Premiere – but stuttering issues in FCPX. When any of the footage renders after adding an effect or something, or if I convert the footage to ProRes, it plays fine. Soo… has anyone experienced this? Very strange.

  I’m using FCPX 10.0.9, an 8-core Mac Pro, 28GB RAM, internal 7200rpm media drive, and the Sapphire 7950 3GB GPU.

  In any event, if anyone’s experienced this issue, give a shout. Thanks!

  Bret Williams replied 12 years, 7 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Craig Seeman

  September 26, 2013 at 4:15 pm

  Whats the source of the footage?

  I ask because I also have 8 Core Mac Pro (2008) and while I have no issues with AVCHD H.264, GoPro generated H.264 seems to be a challenge. It may well have to do with GOP structure, Profile, Entropy. Keep in mind that none of the current MacPro Xeons (until the new one arrives) have AVX support so that may be an issue. My 2011 Quad i7 MBP handles the GoPro footage much better for example.
• 

  Joe Mordecai

  September 26, 2013 at 4:20 pm

  I’m not sure the source, as I didn’t shoot it. But what’s so weird is that the footage plays totally fine outside of FCPX. In FCPX it has to be transcoded to ProRes or rendered in order to play without dropping frames.
• 

  Craig Seeman

  September 26, 2013 at 4:45 pm

  [joe mordecai] “But what’s so weird is that the footage plays totally fine outside of FCPX.”
  Same with GoPro footage. That’s why I suspect that or maybe some other camera shooting with similar encoding specs. My guess is you wont have the issue if you use Sandy Bridge or later processor.

  You may want to compare to something coming from an AVCHD camera. In my case I only see this with GoPro footage so far and not other H.264 camera recordings.
• 

  Bret Williams

  September 26, 2013 at 8:45 pm

  Very much could be the processor/sandy/ivy bridge issue. Many suggest that dslr footage, like from a canon, should be optimized. On the 2011 or 2012 i7 iMacs I’ve not been able to tell the difference. So not much point in optimizing unless you just like taking up drive space. But on my older 2006 MacPro with a 5770 card, it’s not so pretty. But I still just used better performance and hobbled through. Have you tried using the better performance playback setting?

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up