Dropped Frames in FCP with no solution in sight…

[David Roth weiss]

Excellent word smithery Stephen… With such command of the Canadian language you should have abandoned editing years ago. It’s a blue collar job anyway, typically paying less than most garbage men make.

In any case, I guess I’m just lucky? I have always managed to get along well with my NLEs going back as far as the first Avids and D-Vision Pro. Had I simply chosen to become a garbage man I’d be sitting pretty and able to retire sometime soon.

And yes, workarounds have always been and still are integral to successful non-linear editing. But, it’s knowledge of those that’s often the only thing giving us old dogs even a modicum of job security these days. So, I’m all for them.

Long live workarounds!!!

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Michael Gissing]

[Dennis Radeke] “I have never heard of this being a problem and believe me I would”

I have heard of many people struggle with FCS systems with Nvidia graphics cards. It is particularly the case with Color. So if you are going to install both CS5 and FCS on the same mac, using Nvidia cards may compromise the FCS performance. Conversely using an ATI card would mean the Mercury engine would not offer the same RT performance. So either way it is not ideal to have both systems installed on the one machine at present.

I wish it were not so and FCS was happier using the Nvidia cards as I would like to have both FCS and CS5 plus Da Vinci Resolve. Until FCS is faultless with Nvidia cards then I shall wait.

[Anthony Dias]

Jeff,

I think you may be a genius 🙂

I just looked over my screenshots from last week and I noticed that the process WindowServer is using anywhere from 60 to 120 MegaBytes of Virtual Memory when FCP is working properly.

However, when the dropped frames begin to happen, WindowServer is using 16 EB of virtual memory (EXABYTES?!?!?!)

My understanding is that 16 ExaBytes is the theoretical limit of on a 64-bit system.

So, my guess is that there is something wrong going on here and that WindowServer should NOT be eating up this much Virtual Memory? Am I right?

Thanks,
-Tony

[Jeff Greenberg]

Could you send me a screenshot – I’m dying to see what 16 EB looks like (you don’t have to….but it’d be cool.)

Yeah, Something is running amok. Seriously, seriously amok, and it’ AIN’T FCP. Well, maybe not FCP. BTW, when you see that windowserver is that high…what’s your page outs/Swap used?

I’m going to bet that if you test a fresh system with a minimal install, that it’ll be fine.
And we have to try it – we need to see if your system DOESN’T exhibit the problem. Just a 1/2 day or so worth.
And if it works? All this will do is say that something is wonky on your boot system.

I have some brute force ideas- I don’t want to wade through everything earlier – there’s quite a bit of rhetoric in this thread (FCP/Adobe/etc)
I’m not suggesting this YET, but…. did you do a clean install earlier? Also, did you install FCS3 over FCS2? Or upgrade from leopard to snow leopard (vs. just a direct install?)

Sure, let me go for some old school voodoo too: could you run this at a terminal prompt:
kextstat | grep -v apple

This will show all non-apple kernel extensions.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Dennis Radeke]

I think what you’re talking about is a graphics card compatibility and not a compatibility problem with Adobe and FCP on the same system. That’s what I was talking about.

As for GPU, yeah it’s nice but as I’ve said repeatedly – the 64-bit nature of Premiere Pro and the memory addressing account for most of the performance that you’ve heard about. The GPU is just icing on the cake. I would take Premiere Pro with an ATI card and not even bat an eyelash.

As you said, hopefully the GPU issues work themselves out and you can have choice on the graphics cards.

[Anthony Dias]

hmmm…. web host seems to be having issues and I can’t upload my files right now… or even access my website.

I will put up a zip file of screenshots and stuff like that when the server is back up (hopefully soon).

Anyway, I have been repeating the dropped frames issue just now and the virtual memory thing is inconsistent.

The problem does seem to be exacerbated by opening multiple applications, but my experience is that I have been able to replicate the problem in the past without having anything but the Finder and Final Cut Pro.

Now, concerning Virtual Memory, somewhere on the internet I read that the 16 EB number could result if a 64 bit number went negative. And one time I did notice that the Virtual Memory went from 130 MB or so down to almost 0 MB and then to 16EB. So maybe the virtual memory is hitting zero and showing up as an unsigned zero? lol, that’s just a wild guess

I have tried various forms of installing and unisntalling but to be honest, I can’t remember every step I’ve tried.

Anyway, here are my non-apple kernel extensions and I am noticing that there is one from Apogee that I don’t even use anymore which I will uninstall in a bit. Then, if that isn’t the culprit, I’ll get rid of SoundFlower as well. But I kinda want to do this one at a time.

I have already uninstalled the DigiDesign stuff before and that didn’t make a difference (although I’m not sure how good their uninstaller is)

96 0 0x1aa9000 0x1a000 0x19000 com.digidesign.iokit.DigiDal (8.0.4f2) <14 5 4 3 1>
97 0 0x1ac3000 0x7000 0x6000 com.digidesign.iokit.DigiIO (8.0.4f2) <17 14 5 4 3>
99 0 0x94b000 0x2000 0x1000 com.Apogee.driver.DuetFWOverideDriver (1.4.4) <48 11 5 4 3 1>
101 0 0x969000 0x4000 0x3000 com.Cycling74.driver.Soundflower (1.2.1) <94 93 8 5 4 3 1>
102 7 0x1aca000 0x9000 0x8000 com.matrox.vpg.DriverHelpers (1.0.0d1) <5 4 3 1>
103 0 0x1be0000 0x3a000 0x39000 com.matrox.vpg.MXO2Driver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
105 0 0x1a8c000 0x1d000 0x1c000 com.digidesign.fwfamily.driver (8.0.4f2) <104 94 48 5 4 3 1>
120 0 0x1bdd000 0x3000 0x2000 com.matrox.vpg.ClockDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
121 0 0x1c28000 0x10000 0xf000 com.matrox.vpg.VideoOutputDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
122 0 0x1c21000 0x7000 0x6000 com.matrox.vpg.VideoInputDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
123 0 0x1ad3000 0x9000 0x8000 com.matrox.vpg.AudioDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 94 5 4 3 1>
125 0 0x1c1a000 0x7000 0x6000 com.matrox.vpg.RS422Driver (1.0.0d1) <124 102 5 4 3 1>
126 0 0x1adc000 0x101000 0x100000 com.matrox.vpg.AvcCodecDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
130 0 0x1c38000 0x3000 0x2000 com.paceap.kext.pacesupport.snowleopard (5.7.2) <7 5 4 3 1>
video-productions-mac-pro-2:~ videoproduction$

[Anthony Dias]

I’m posting on here just in case some poor soul out there runs into the same problem that has been plaguing my workflow for over a year and a half.

I guess the problem was that I was trying to drive a 30 inch monitor at full 2560 x 1600 resolution AND trying to edit video at the same time. (Even though, if I remember correctly, it should have been enough according to the marketing information on Apple’s web site back then).

Anwyay, last night, I opened up my Mac Pro 3,1 (2x3GHz Quad Nehalem) and I upgraded the NVIDIA 8800 GT (512 GB VRAM) card to an ATI 5870 (1024 GB VRAM).

Today, NO MORE DROPPED FRAMES!

I still have the Matrox MXO 2 LE hooked up.

I still have the Digidesign MBox Pro 2 on its own firewire bus (PTLE 8.x)

FCP is working just GREAT!

I can finally edit sequences in 1920×1080 and not worry about dropped frames.

Cheers,
-Tony

[Anthony Dias]

Michael,

Thank You 🙂

I have upgraded to the ATI 5870 and the dropped frames issue has gone away.

-Tony

[Gabriel Cullen]

Hey guys-

I have been having a ton of problems with my brand new 12core MAC when running FCP. I have 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3. The operating system is Mountain Lion. The processor is 2 * 2.66 GHz 6 Core Intel Xeon.

My problem is coming in many areas. First and foremost FCP quits on me every couple hours. Especially when doing any graphics work or dealing with files that aren’t mathced with my sequence settings. I have been doing workarounds though by trying to convert all my footage to Apple Pro Res HQ, but still I’m having all the same problems and honetly shouldn’t have to do workarounds with a system with this strength.

Also, when trying to render or sometimes even just playback I get a Out of Memory box come up, which is impossible with this powerful of a machine.

And on top of all that, when it’s not just shutting down or giving me an Out of Memory warning, the frames will jump around. Even when I stop the playhead the clip will show me an image that is from a previous clip. And then eventually FCP will just crash.

I’m posting on this forum because it’s the closest match to the problem I am currently having. When I first open up FCP things seem to work for 10-20 min, but then it all starts falling apart. But the solution of getting an ATI card won’t work, as my computer already has the ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB Graphics Card attached.

I have had these problems no matter what codecs I’ve been working with and no matter what size my sequences are.

I have the Matrox2 LE attached to my system but only run my flanders monitor off of it. I have all the current updates for the Matrox system installed.

Oh and I am running FCP7.

I am not a techie, so if you need more info or need for me to run tests please be specific as even some of the suggestions above confussed me.

I appreciate any help you guys can give.

Thanks,
Gabe

[Anthony Dias]

Hi Gabriel,

The issues you have don’t sound normal and I would be tempted to return the machine and get another one… but before you do that, maybe you can give us some more info such as:

1) What are your Scratch Disk settings?

2) How fast is your Data Hard Drive
-This question assumes that you are using a dedicated hard drive for your system and applications and a separate dedicated hard drive for your video footage (both with a minimum of 7200 RPM).

3) What format is the footage are you using the most that has this problem? DV? XDCAM? H264? (before encoding to ProRes)?

4) Do you have these issues when the Matrox is NOT connected to your system?

5) Do you have any other software on your machine that uses the Graphics Card (i.e. BlackMagic Davinci… which wreaked havoc when I tried installing it on my machine… never mind that I couldn’t use it anyway because it doesn’t run on ATI cards)

6) Are you using the internet or specifically Flash based websites while editing?

7) Are you connected to the internet on this machine while editing? (not that it should matter)

8) Are you using an external audio interface and what kind?

9) Are you accessing ANY of your footage from your local computer network?

If you can try to answer these questions one at a time with a bit of detail, perhaps we can find the gremlin that is wreaking havoc.

peace,
-Tony