-
Digitizing – Dropped Frames recurring problems
Hello all,
I am in dire need of Final Cut help. I have been having problems for the last three months which have prevented me from importing the remaining footage for a documentary I have been working on. Long story short, I have a G5, 3 external firewire 800 hardrives(Rocstor) 200gig, FC 4.1. I imported the majority of my footage over a year and a half ago into the first two harddrives. My third harddrive caused me lots of problems also preventing me from capturing, until I recently initialized it and now it is fine.
The PROBLEM now is every time I try to either capture a clip, or batch capture, the deck rewinds to the first image and freezes and tells me dropped frames. It doesn’t matter what tape I use or where on the tape every time FC reads ‘dropped frames’ and therefore won’t let me digitize. I went into USER preferences and changed the button which forces the capture to abort if dropped frames and I could import, only everything I imported is out of snyc and the time code is wrong.
A friend told me to trash my preferences. Any ideas, suggestions? If I decide to do this, how do I do it and is there any advice before I do it?
Thank you so much in advance. Final Cut will be the death of me yet, or at least the cause of an ulcer or two.
Jon
-
2 Replies
-
Hi Jon,
The friend who suggested trashing your FCP pref files gave you good advice. It won’t hurt anything to do this because once you start up again FCP will automatically create new pref files. It sounds like this might be the root of your troubles.
Go to the link below to learn how to trash the pref files properly and why you need to do it once in a while:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/trashing_fcp_prefs.html
There’s also a free program called Final Cut Pro Rescue that will do the job for you. Just do a Google search and you’ll find it.
Since you’ve been working on your doc for over 1 1/2 years now there might also be problems with the directories on your media drives that will also prevent FCP from accessing your files properly. You should consider buying the program DiskWarrior to keep these important directories on top shape. Disk directories sometimes get corrupted over time just from adding and deleting files from the hard drives. DiskWarrior will build a brand new directory instead of trying to repair the old one like some lesser programs do. Read about keeping your system in good shape by going here:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/care_feeding_panther.html
Hope this all helps you.
– Don
– Don
-
Don, thank you for your time and help. I trashed my prefs to no avail really. Yesterday I could import only into my internal HD, and only if I logged all of my offline clips and in and out points over(it wouldnt read my already logged clips). So I transferred everything on my HD to one of my externals, I read somewhere that sometimes external firewire HD arent meant for capturing.
That being said I really need help. As of yesterday I could at least capture the clips if I relogged the outpoints but as of this morning, I am not able. What is going on here? Again it says dropped frames and will not allow me to capture anything, regardless of the drive I save it into. Unfornuately I don’t have money to buy the disk warrior and I can’t call Apple since my version 4.1 is not legit, so I am at loss at what to do and my timeframe is very thin.
Please anyone that has any ideas as to why I can’t digitize without the dropped frames appearing let me know. I can’t believe just how many problems Final Cut has given me in the last 4 months.
Thanks in advance,
Jon
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up