Dropped frames in FCP 7

[Alex m. White]

Noa,

You are certainly not the only one with this issue. I am having the almost EXACT same problem. I am editing 720 × 480 SD DV footage with 48khz AIFF files, and about half way into my project I started getting the ‘Dropped Frames’ error followed by horrible PZZZP audio errors and then absolutely no sound was able to be played back: through the internal MacBook Pro speakers, my studio headphones, audio files inside OR outside FCP. I have to restart my entire system to get an audio playing back through any application/output.

I also cannot find my audio render or autosave files anywhere, and I’ve been setting scratch disks the same way since FCP 4 in ’05 through FCP 6 this month.

Here are my specs:
MacBook Pro, OS X v.10.6.2
3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Internal Drive: 500GB SATA @ 7200 rpm (440GB Available)
External Drive: 120GB LaCie Rugged connected with FW 800 (89GB Available)
Final Cut Studio 3/Final Cut Pro 7.0.1

It just doesn’t seem like it should be a hardware issue. I’ve also:

[Vie Chan]

hi alex,

yes, it got to the point where i thought it must be me being a complete idiot but at least now i’ve found one other person who has the EXACT problem.

i’ve tried everything. i’m still at square one.
do you think it might have sthg to do w/ using the FW800…? i’ve always set my renders and audio files to go on my external.
i haven’t really tested it w/out the FW800 because i have literally nothing to work w/ on my internal HD. and if i can’t use an external HD w/ the MBP, then the machine is simply useless for video editing.

[Vie Chan]

alex….
this may be a very dumb question, but i assume you’ve tried running all the software updates too, right?
i am trying again… after that i am thinking of selling my MBP and buying a 2nd hand one that’s not on snow leopard.

[Steve Modica]

I would suggest you look at the cpu meter during playback. I’d be interested to know if one cpu is pegged.

[Fernando Pieschacon]

Any solutions yet?

I’m getting many dropped frames even when all there is in my timeline is a 2 channel AIFF. Projects i edited with no problems in FCP 6 now are almost unworkable unless i turn the dropped frames warning off.

Browsed Apple forums and found nothing.

[Philip Hack]

I’ve got similar problems, seemingly unresolvable. I’m running Snow on a 2.66 8 Core Mac with the latest FCP 7 updates all in with a Kona LHi. I’m using a GSpeed ES Pro 8TB ,4 disk array in Raid 5. The AJA tests tell me my drives don’t fall below 200 MB/s on the read side and higher on the write side. I’ve got a project that’s 1080i in a 29.97 ProRes sequence that was originally captured on an EX-3 at 23.98. FCP has put in its crappy 2224 pulldown sequence and everything in the timeline is now fully rendered at 29.97. When I try to print to video, I get dropped frames every time. I’m outputting to an HDCam deck (trying). I’ve even converted it to a quicktime to try to get it to play out and that doesn’t work either. Dropped frames all the time, all at different times in the sequence (never got more than 10 minutes of output). I’ve trashed the prefs, tried a new user – everything short of wiping the machine. The machine has never run anything but FCP and is about a month old. Any ideas?

[David Scarborough]

This may be of some help and interest in regards to this problem as I recently upgrade to FCP 7 and have had the exact same problems and issues with audio and dropped frames as described in this thread.

I work with XD HD 50mb/s footage and occasionally have to mix this with DVCPro HD footage taken with a P2. In FCP 6 this worked brilliantly with no issues mixing these two formats but now on FCP 7 i’m getting the audio buzzing and dropped frames and it’s driving me crazy.

So, I took someone’s suggestion of watching the CPU meters while playing my timeline and also had a look at “All Processes” that were running on my machine (2 x 2.26 GHz Quad Core, 8 GB RAM, Leopard, eSata connected 8TB RAID).

There are three processes that are “Not Responding”. The first two are called CompressorJobController and CompressorTranscoder. I tried canceling them but every time I did it would come back on as a running process and after playing a clip in FCP they would change to “Not Responding”. I’m still researching as to what this means and how it can be fixed or if it is something that needs to be fixed.

The third process that was not responding was labelled “coreaudiod” and it operates on the root user. Again i cancelled the process and it also showed up again but this time it didn’t change to not responding. I went back to FCP and played my timeline and there were no more dropped frames and the audio no longer made the pzzzzp sound.

I’m starting to research now how this can be permanently fixed as I don’t want to have to open my Activity Monitor and cancel the process every time i start up.

Hope this helps those of you who haven’t decided to downconvert to FCP 6 as I was so nearly ready to do as well.

[Philip Hack]

Hi David,

I will take a look and see if I have those same problems. Thanks,

Philip

[Leon Lewis]

Hi David,

Have you found any solution to this yet? I have been running into the same problems….

Best,

Leon Lewis

“Standing on the shoulders of giants.”

[Anthony Dias]

I just want to add to the chorus of unhappy FCP 7 users who keep getting dropped frames whereI shouldn’t be getting them at all. Specifically: DV-NTSC timelines. Trust me, I have worked on way lower-end machines without these types of problems, including my first generation MacBook and G5 Power Macs.

So, my conclusion, after hours of trouble shooting is that either the FCP 7.x update is SUPER BUGGY or there is a hardware incompatibility in my system… which is technically still a bug right?

Oh, and all my software and hardware drivers are UP TO DATE as of today.

Some potential problematic hardware that I have connected to my machine (see machine profile at end):

– Digidesign MBox 2 Pro (which is on it’s own FireWire PCI card because it used to cause my audio to stop working)
– Matrox MXO2 LE w/Max
– G-Safe (2x2TB)
– ColorMunki (definitely has cause some headaches as well with Motion showing blank canvases)

here’s my system:

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro3,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB
Memory: 14 GB