dropped frames laying off to tape

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

There is a function in FCP that is often overlooked… and it can help with many audio and video “skipping”, “sticking” and “missing” problems.

You should “Mixdown” the Audio for playback before you dub out of FCP, or during the edit, if you have audio/video stuttering, drop-outs, sync-slippage, or freezes.

NOTE: Mixdown has even been demonstrated to help with slipping, skipping problems (or “missing” audio clips) for files being EXPORTED as QT (or similar) files out of FCP.

First, SELECT ALL of your audio tracks (highlight them) on the timeline, then:

Sequence Menu > Render Only > Mixdown.

You should see a dialog box telling you its rendering.

It might seem to make little sense that “Mixing down” even simple audio tracks will “fix” complex video “freezes” or random audio dropouts to tape or export, but it CAN.

NOTE: It does not matter of you only have one audio track, if there are random freezes during output, you should try the Mixdown.

[David Roth weiss]

Jason,

RT settings will cause your FCP to drop down either in terms of, 1) the number of frames, or 2) the quality of the video during normal playback from the timeline, depending on your choice of settings. However, those RT settings and RT performance has little whatsoever to do with actual dropped frames when using Edit to Tape. During ETT the RT functionality of FCP is disabled, and if, for any reason, the throughput of your system is not high enough for the machine to playback the combined overhead of all video and audio tracks, you will drop frames and FCP will choke.

So, either something isn’t rendered properly, your audio isn’t mixed down as THAX mentioned, or you have a throughput issue you need to track down that is either hardware related or possibly software related.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Arnie Schlissel]

Most likely you need to use faster hard drives. It’s also possible that your drives are too full, and they’ll stop dropping frames if you can free up enough space that they’re no more than 70-75% full

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Cade Muhlig]

[Arniepix] “Most likely you need to use faster hard drives. It’s also possible that your drives are too full, and they’ll stop dropping frames if you can free up enough space that they’re no more than 70-75% full”

that was my problem, and also make sure you dont have any other firewire devices hooked up (that is if you are using firewire).

[Todd Reid]

Everything suggested is rock on.

To add a couple more little things…

Make sure your overlays are not turned on (safe title, time code, excess luma) and make sure your viewer/canvas aren’t overlapping (do the standard window arrange to make sure).

the problem is most likely the audio mixdown.

I do all these things before all output and I seldom have dropped frames troubles.