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dropped frames on playback
Hello.
I am editing on a 2008 Mac Pro. I started getting the “dropped frames on playback” often in the past few months. At a certain moment, I get the warning. It comes out with the playhead at about the same frame, even if I rendered the sequence. The only way out is quitting FCP7 and launching it again. The problem will vanish for some time, and then appear again in a different point. This happens even on a fresh project. I am using the same camcorders in the past three years, and I had no problems before with the same settings. I have one drive for system and applications, a two drives striped RAID array for the media and one drive as a scratch disk. First, I tried a complete reinstall from scratch on formatted drives. Same problem after some time. So I bought four brand new faster drives (the striped ones were Green, now they’re fast ones), and reinstalled everything from scratch. After some time the problem is showing up again. I even had some RAM added. Still the same problem. I moved the project and media to a FW external drive and spent some time editing it with a Macbook Pro, and I had no problem of any kind. What puzzles me most is that powering off and on will temporarily solve the problem, so it does not really seem a speed problem. Any idea?
Thanks
Fabrizio D’Agnano -
7 Replies
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What camera codec and sequence settings are you using?
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Well, there’s a problem here. I am using mixed formats. I have some HDV clips coming from a Sony HVR-V1, some coming from a HF100 Canon that FCP reads correctly about the fields order after importing with log and transfer pro res, and some from a Canon HF-s100 that are read as “none” as a field priority while they’re actually “upper”, so that I have to correct them in the “item properties” box. Occasionally some from a ContourHD. The sequence is ProRes HD 1080 50i. The warnings are not predictable, as they happen on different clips. More if there’s some overlay or such. But the strange thing is they come out even after a complete rendering, and vanish with the turn off/turn back on.
FabrizioFabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy -
The other point that makes me feel it’s not a codec problem is that I can edit the same project with the same footage on a Macbook Pro, media and scratch on an external single FW drive, must likely much slower (the MBP is a few months old while the Mac Pro is 2008, but disk speed wise there should be no match).
FabrizioFabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy -
Have you done the usual maintenance like trash prefs, repairing permissions? It is obviously machine specific.
Also are you running other background tasks like Mail or a browser? It shouldn’t cause drop frames but..
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No. I tried to reinstall from scratch (OS.X to the latest version of Snow Leopard and on) a couple of times. Very time consuming, maybe useful for some other thing, but apparently not with this problem. Lately I switched to a double display. I am wondering if that could be an issue with the 8800GT GPU…….
Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy -
Yes certainly possible. FCP is optimised for ATI not NVIDIA. That should mostly affect rendering of fxplugins but it might be worth searching this forum to see if there could be a dual display NVIDIA link
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Thank you! I’ll search that direction, it seems the only logical one.
Fabrizio
Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
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