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CHoppy playback when editing 4 1080 HD clips at the same time
Hi all,
First post here, although I’ve been using this great forum for years.I’m working on a project where I’m splitting the screen in 4 and playing a clip in each one of the corners.
I shot everything on a Canon 550d and converted the clips to ProRes 422. When trying to playback, the sequence plays for a second or so, then begins to be choppy until it freezes (but the audio continues to play).
It’s impossible to edit with this problem. Anyone have suggestions as to how I can overcome this?
Thanks in advance.FCP 7.0
MacBookPro
OS 10.6.8
2.53 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3Working off an external hard drive – firewire 800
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9 Replies
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Four streams of ProRes 1080 is too much for a Firewire 800 drive to manage to play back. It can do two streams, max. For 4 streams, you need a faster connector. eSATA, and the drives need to be at least a two-drive RAID 0. So I hope your laptop has either Thunderbolt (thunderbolt can do 4 streams too) or an Express34 slot, so you can get an Express34 to eSATA adapter.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Hey, thanks for the quick response.
I have an Express34 slot… never knew what it was for til now! Also have eSATA on the hard drive.
Don’t have an adapter though. I might try and transfer all files to my internal hard-drive and work off that for now. Hopefully that will help. -
You can’t get 4 streams to play back on a single drive. A single drive via eSATA, or internal, is only slightly faster than firewire. Where you might get 85MB/s via firewire, a single eSATA will get 120MB/s. You need at least 200MB/s.
And playing back from internal SYSTEM drives is never recommended. First off, they are typically 5400RPM, not the 7200RPM that is needed for video. But also they are very busy dealing with the OS, and if they need a system resource in the middle of playback…boom, dropped frame playback.
Nope, that won’t work either.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/EXP34SATA2P1/
and one of these:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Mercury-EliteAL-Pro-RAID
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Yikes! It’s a never ending money pit!
Would the 1.0 TB with 32 MB cache drive (on the page you linked to) be sufficient then?
Thanks for the knowledge. -
YEAH, that would work out great.
Sorry, working with video isn’t cheap, not when you want 4 streams of full res playback. There are workflows to make this work on slower, lower capacity drives…it’s called the OFFLINE/ONLINE workflow. You ingest the media at a lower resolution. Edit, then reingest only what you used in the cut at full resolution. It gets complicated, but it is what people do to get past the drive size/speed issues.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Brilliant. You’ve been very helpful, go raibh maith agat +++
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Couldn’t Colm change the playback quality and frame rate in FCP so he could just get the edits done?
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Hi Martin,
I’ve tried all that to no avail.
Hard drive arrived today… will get beck to ye with results. -
Did the trick!
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