-
I’ve fallen and I can’t get up; dropped frames during capture
I’m logging and capturing some footage that for an international project, which also means I am located in Accra, Ghana, away from all helpful tech support. Perhaps this will earn me an extra sympathy point or two with any FCP wizards out there?
I shot several hours on MiniDV on my DVX100. I intended for it to all be in 24pa, but the the scene file got bumped at some point and some of it is likely just 24P. I am not even sure if that’s a relevant detail, but maybe it is contributing to the problem.
During my attempts to capture the footage, I’ve run into a host of problems. First, I was getting the error message: “Warning: you are about to capture non drop-frame media to a drop-frame clip. etc, etc.” I didn’t even know there was a place to select drop-frame/non-drop-frame for capture? At any rate (and despite other forums where it has been claimed that the DVX100 does not shoot anything but drop-frame in 24p & 24pa mode), I checked this footage, and it is definitely non-drop frame on the tape. So, I switched it all over to that.
Next I started getting claims that there were dropped frames and a “loss of cadence.” I thought the 23.98 framerate was giving me some trouble, and since I am exporting to NTSC in the end anyhow, I have just been capturing the footage in 29.97 (with the 2:3:3:2 pulldown removal). Hopefully its not significantly more lossy to do it this way?
But most aggravatingly (and now I get to my main issue), the dropped frames problem has continued. And I get them with nearly every clip I try to capture, right at the beginning as the first few frames come up on my computer monitor and it starts to record. The process stops and the machine auto-retries once; if it doesn’t work a second time, then I manually re-cycle it, and strangely, if I keep repeatedly trying to capture, it often works by the third or fourth time, as if it just found a way through. Even more strangely, when I get tired of that and just switch to “Capture Now” mode and then roughly capture the logged clip on the fly, it brings the footage in without a single hiccup. So I can technically go back through all my logged clips, copy their names and descriptions, introduce that information into Capture Now, and recopy them one at a time.
But that’s not really a sustainable solution — and I am no nearer to solving the source of all this. I’ve even I tried opening a new project and logging the footage again, and it had the same frame dropping issues. Tomorrow I will shoot some test tapes in different modes, to check if maybe it is an issue with the MiniDV itself. But I don’t think it is something mechanical, (the tape, camera or cable), as the whole apparatus works fine in Capture Now mode. Which leaves me thinking its something about how the computer is processing the logged clips, because the dropped frames are occurring right at the beginning of the attempt to capture, just as the clip is actually beginning to be recorded.
And that’s where I am. If anyone can help, I would be very appreciative.
TA
-
1 Reply
-
I suspect that the reason you’re dropping frames, is that your Pre-Roll is not giving the camera/ FCP enough room to distinguish the the frame cadence, even though you have allowed for the 3 1/2 Sec’s for the camera to get video speed. Try at least a 4 or 5 sec Pre-Roll.
Also, if I understood correctly, you may have clips logged as 24pA but are actually 24p and vice-versa, this will cause unreliable capturing and dropped frames.
you may also want to go into FCP> A/V Settings and check your capture preset to be sure that it’s set up to remove pull down for FW devices.
Hopefully some of that helps.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up