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FCP 7 strange playback issue gets worse over time
Hi there,
Has anyone experienced this strange playback issue? It started when I began editing 1080p material in Prores and upgrading to Snow Leopard. Basically, the system works fine at the beginning of the day, but if I go to check e-mail or look something up online, then go back to editing, video and audio becomes jittery, dropping frames, etc. Only a restart will solve the problem. Closing down the other programs will not.
I’m on a MacPro with plenty of RAM, fast drives, etc. The problem exists whether using external video monitoring or not, so it’s not my MXO2 box, I don’t think.
It’s almost as if the CPU gets occupied with some invisible task that slows down performance. . .
Any help or thoughts would be much appreciated. Thank you very much!
Best,
Oren Hercz
Journeyman Film Company -
24 Replies
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Are you using the latest drivers from Matrox? Should be 2.2.3 for Snow Leopard.
Trashing your preferences can’t hurt. Use Digital Rebellion’s Preference Manager.
One more thing overlooked is your window layout. Hit Control U to reset and Shift Z in you Canvas and Viewer.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
You can also use Console while it’s happening to see if any errors come about. And use Activity Monitor to see what’s hogging your CPU. Generally, I never update anything while in the middle of a project, this almost always creates problems. I suspect that it’s a driver/firmware incompatibility between something and something, from updating to Snow Leopard.
http://www.tulpapictures.com
Twitter: @tulpapictures
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tulpapicturesMac 2.66 GHz Quad Intel Xeon
OSX 10.6.8
FCS2
CS5
8GB RAM
ProAvio 8TB RAID 5 Dual Mini-SAS
Blackmagic Intensity Pro
ATI Radeon X1900
RocketRAID 4322 via dual MiniSAS
Panasonic Lumix GH2, Canon 5DMKII, 7D, Panasonic HVX200A, Panasonic DVX100A -
Thank you for the tips Joseph and Steve,
I will try out all these suggestions and see if I can get to the bottom of it.
Cheers,
Oren -
[Oren Hercz] “It started when I began editing 1080p material in Prores and upgrading to Snow Leopard.”
If you did an upgrade over the top of Leopard, but not a clean install, you may never find the issue. Issues such as the one you’re having now are very common when a simple update is performed between different OSs. A clean install of the new OS is the only reliable way to do the job.
In the future, clone your old system drive to a firewire drive first, then wipe the system drive and start from scratch.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new Creative Cow Podcast: Bringing “The Whale” to the Big Screen:
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/Podcast-Series-2-MikeParfitandSuzanneChisholm/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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Thanks David,
Actually, I did do a clean install of Snow Leopard thanks to the good advice of yourself and others on the forums so that I could avoid issues like this!
Hopefully, that means resolving the issue will be easier.
Cheers,
Oren -
[Oren Hercz] “Actually, I did do a clean install of Snow Leopard thanks to the good advice of yourself and others on the forums so that I could avoid issues like this!”
Very good!!!
[Oren Hercz] “Hopefully, that means resolving the issue will be easier.”
It will definitely make the job easier.
1) Run Software update until everything is up to date
2) Fix permissions on the system drive using Disk Utility
3) Run Disk Warrior on all drives if you have it
4) if the above fails, try the FCP repair tools from https://www.Digitalrebellion.comIf all of the above fails then write back and we’ll go deeper.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new Creative Cow Podcast: Bringing “The Whale” to the Big Screen:
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/Podcast-Series-2-MikeParfitandSuzanneChisholm/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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Hi folks,
Remember me? I know it’s been a little while. Happy New Year everyone.
I wanted to continue this discussion about the problem I was having. It hasn’t gone away, despite me doing most of the suggestions above.
So I’m wondering now if it is something to do with how my system is set-up. Can I give you my specs and you let me know if anything seems amiss? The problem only surfaced when I started editing 1080p Prores 422 material regularly. 720p still plays back no problem, so I’m thinking now that this may have always been a latent problem in the system. Again, problem is–on a fresh restart timeline plays fine, but after a couple of hours (especially if Motion, Mail, Firefox, etc. have been in use as well), it starts to stutter regularly, dropping frames, and putting audio out of sync. The problem usually starts when going a over a dark green or bright green render bar, but once it starts it persists on segments that have been fully rendered. Only way to solve it is to restart.
So this is my system:
Computer:
Apple Mac Pro (8-core Xeon 5400 Series) 2nd Gen. Early 2008 Desktop/PC
RAM: 10GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MBMedia Drives:
Either:
2 1.5TB drive internal striped RAID set (total capacity 3TB), or,
External GRAID 2 1TB drive from GTECH, through Firewire 800.Output Box:
Matrox MXO2 feeding HP Dreamcolor through HDMIOS:
Snow Leopard 10.6.8Everything has been updated to its most current version. Drives have all been defragged, permissions checked, FCP preferences trashed, etc. Regarding the FCP repair tools, I wasn’t sure which were useful to my situation aside from the trashing preferences one which I did.
The only other thing I’ll mention is that the system does crash more often than I would like. Often, I’ll experience the problem, then shut down. On restart, after log-in I get the scary transparent gray screen that says I need to hold down the power button and restart my computer. I’ll do this and then everything will be fine.
Any help would be much appreciated. I’m tempted to reload the whole system onto a new boot drive, but I don’t want to do all that work only to experience the problem again!
Thoughts? Thanks again!
Oren
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Hey Oren,
Sorry for the delay. Happy New Year to you. I am wondering if you found a solution? Have you tried monitoring your CPU usage during specific tasks? It sounds like you did a clean install of the OS, and you’ve tried other steps such as permissions repair and disk health tools, to no avail?I had a similar issue like this. I couldn’t playback my edits without dropping frames, and other system holdups and hiccups, making editing a real pain. Mornings were better than later in the day. I had internally striped RAID as well which was my capture scratch. I fixed my problem by updating my storage and IO feed.
One thing to think about is that an internal striped RAID (via internal HDDs and Disk Utility) is not the ideal way to have high speed throughput and CPU’s unencumbered. An internally striped RAID requires the computer’s CPUs to control them. It is much more ideal to have a RAID PCI-E card installed that has hardware based CPU RAID controller, thereby taking the processing off of your computer’s CPUs and handling it on the RAID card’s CPU instead. This will relieve the inherent bottleneck. Couple this with high speed cables and an external RAID chassis and you’ll be pulling in enough throughput to edit several streams of uncompressed HD.
HD video, depending on your choice of codec, will require high enough throughput. Especially when you want the best HD possible, either Uncompressed or ProRes 422 HQ. To help determine if it’s a throughput issue, are you keeping your files on the internal RAID or the external GTECH? Firewire 800 isn’t going to do it for you either, depending on what codec you are using. Also, what codec are you cutting with? FCP7? How many video streams? How do you have your material organized? Organization of your material and how the NLE links to them is just as important.
Building an external RAID with hardware is not cheap, and I know this is not what you want to hear. But it sounds like your system is getting bogged down when you need high throughput, so the answer that I can think of is creating better throughput.
http://www.tulpapictures.com
Twitter: @tulpapictures
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tulpapicturesMac 2.66 GHz Quad Intel Xeon
OSX 10.6.8
FCS2
CS5
8GB RAM
ProAvio 8TB RAID 5 Dual Mini-SAS
Blackmagic Intensity Pro
ATI Radeon X1900
RocketRAID 4322 via dual MiniSAS
Panasonic Lumix GH2, Canon 5DMKII, 7D, Panasonic HVX200A, Panasonic DVX100A -
One other thing to check out is your RAM health. You can run a test with an app called Rember. See if your RAM is faulty and if it is, replace it and see if that helps.
http://www.tulpapictures.com
Twitter: @tulpapictures
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tulpapicturesMac 2.66 GHz Quad Intel Xeon
OSX 10.6.8
FCS2
CS5
8GB RAM
ProAvio 8TB RAID 5 Dual Mini-SAS
Blackmagic Intensity Pro
ATI Radeon X1900
RocketRAID 4322 via dual MiniSAS
Panasonic Lumix GH2, Canon 5DMKII, 7D, Panasonic HVX200A, Panasonic DVX100A -
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for the input. I agree, my system is a bit of a Frankensystem at times. I’ve got the internal striped RAID, but then sometimes I’m also drawing media off a stock footage drive which is just a bare 7200 RPM drive plugged into an ESATA dock (I have an ESATA PCIe card).
I did a RAM test using Apple Hardware Utility, so all the hardware seems to be working fine.
I’ve been thinking about getting a proper external RAID array. Can you recommend? I want to get something that could support (or connect to) networked attached storage down the line as it looks like things are heading in that direction for our company.
The reason I haven’t thought about this in the past is that we edit in Apple Prores 422, not HQ, so even Firewire 800 should have plenty of bandwidth to accomodate, even without RAIDED drives.
Problem is, only way to test this is to invest a lot of money in new drives and see if things fare better. That’s an expensive experiment!
One more thing, the problem seems to occur when I hit green render bars, at least at first. Does that give any more clues?
Cheers,
Oren
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