• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Jerky playback on computer, smooth on AJA-fed monitor

  Posted by Rod Main on March 8, 2011 at 10:42 am

  Hi all

  I boot up, open FCP, everything is behaving fine. After a few minutes my playback in the viewer, canvas and even my Digital Cinema Desktop become jerky, like it is running at 8 or 10 fps.

  Meanwhile the signal playing out to a monitor via my AJA Kona LHe is still playing absolutely smoothly at 25fps.

  If I restart the Mac everything is smooth again for a while until it starts being jerky some minutes later. This effect is not confined to any particular project or type of footage.

  My set up: MacPro 3.1 2xQuad-Core 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon. OSX10.6.6. FCP 7.03. Mostly 108025 ProRes media running off either internal RAID0 or external RAID5 ProAvio array. (Both giving consistently higher than 200 MB/s read/writes)

  I have trashed my preferences and problem remains. My setup has been serving me well for three years now and I have made no changes I can think of that correspond to this problem starting. I am thinking that the MacPro graphics card is the problem. It is the NVidia GeForce 8800GT that it shipped with.
  Anyone have any helpful input? Is there a way to test my graphics card to see if it is dying?

  Steve Eisen replied 15 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Andy Mees

  March 8, 2011 at 1:23 pm

  If you turn off external video monitoring altogether (Cmd F12) do you still get jerky playback in the Canvas and Viewer?
  How about of you play back the same clip in Quicktime Player 7?
• 

  Steve Eisen

  March 8, 2011 at 4:16 pm

  Press Control U to reset you windows.

  Steve Eisen
  Eisen Video Productions
  Vice President
  Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

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