-
Dropped Frames on Playback
I have a 52:00 DV program that doesn’t seem to want to play to tape without dropping frames and freezing. I’ve rendered everything and I’ve mixdown-ed the audio. I changed the RT Audio mixing to 4 tracks and rendered the rest. (I have 8 tracks of Audio.) It’s in Safe RT mode.
In some parts there are up to 18 layered tracks of video, but mostly it’s just one track.
My system is pretty fast, a dual 2Ghz G5.
Should everything be nested, or is that irrelevant? Other thoughts?
-
10 Replies
-
You could spend hours trying to figure out why it’s dropping frames when printing to tape, everything from the audio mixdown thing to trashing FCP pref. files. The work around is to render a self-contained QT movie, then a new sequence in FCP, import your movie and print to tape. If you’re still dropping frames, just hit record on the deck and hit play in FCP. Afterwards you can delete the new sequence and the self-contained movie, if you don’t need it. Make sense?
– Don
-
Do you mean to export the sequence as a self-contained QT movie?
-
Yes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that.
– Don
-
Thanks, Don. I figured that’s what you meant, already did it, and it worked perfectly. Much appreciated.
Pete -
Glad it worked out. I suspect you had too many tracks for FCP to play them all back perfectly and perform the prin to tape command all at the same time. That takes a lot of processing power. Bringing a self-contained QT movie back in to FCP is the quick fix.
– Don
-
If you have fast drives, you don’t have to do that. Let me guess…are you using FireWire drives? 😉
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Seminar!
fcpworld.com -
Correct. I’m using FireWire drives. For the most part, quite reliable. This was an especially complex and long sequence but the work around worked, especially when I transferred the QT movie to my internal HD and recorded to tape from that. No issues.
Thanks for all the info!
-
Glad it worked out for you. I have found that when I output from a FireWire drive from my lowly powerbook, I don’t even bother trying to output my timeline without pumping out a ref movie first.
With faster drives, this isn’t necessary, so it saves a wee bit of time.
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Seminar!
fcpworld.com -
btw, it can also be some sort of sequence corruption. I remember a project where I was getting dropped frames in the middle of an empty part of the timeline, at a very specific place. This was on FCP 4.1, on a dual G5 2Ghz. Trashing prefs, deleting renders, rebooting the computer, etc did not do it. I had to copy all the clips into another sequence. It seems FCP sometimes creates invisible clips in the timeline.
I remember having opened this project recently on 4.5 and had the same problem. I wonder what I’ll find if I export an EDL or XML…. Maybe the yak let me a surprise?
-
Sometimes Bruce will do that.
– Don
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up