FCP 4.5 dropping frames

[Ben Insler]

I’ve been working with the DVX-100 and now the DVX-100A basically since they came out, and to your timecode/capturing issues, unfortunately all I can say is Welcome to the DVX-100A. It is something that has plagued caputring for me and my co-workers since the first time we shot on the camera… Set up an hour long capture, go grab some lunch, and when you get back it’s lost the TC and only captured one clip. You won’t see any drops in the TC when you’re watching the display as you’re playing back a tape, but if you shuttle frame by frame, you might see a jump from 00:23:45:15 to 00:23:45:22… what happened to the missing frames? I don’t know, but FCP can’t work with that. There are a few logging work-arounds that we have used. First of all, when capturing from the DVX series, go into your user prefs. and uncheck the “abort capture on dropped frames” box and set the “On timecode break:” option to ‘warn after capture.’ That will ensure that if the TC jumps while a clip is capturing, FCP will ignore that and just keep capturing your clip as is with no jumps, jitters, or hang-ups, and it won’t abort because of it. As a result FCP will now only abort the capture if a TC jump is within it’s pre/post roll seek area. To fix this, we have made a bunch of new capture presets with altered pre/post roll settings. If you’re still getting troube (which I wouldn’t doubt) and you’re simply capturing shot by shot, you could try adding handles so that the in/out points of every shot now sit in the previous/next shot, hopefully placing the in/out points in an area where a TC jump is less likely.

In terms of your playback problems, the first thing that jumps into my mind (although I don’t know why you would be able to have flawless playback in iMovie) are your Hard Drive specs. Is it a 7200 RPM with at least an 8Mb cache and is it connected in such a way that provides enough throughput for DV playback (if it’s internal, than this question might be rediculous, but I just thought I’d ask). If all of that is good to go, my next question is does your budget allow for another HDD, because maybe this one has some problems (you said you just purchased it, right? Sometimes, though rarely, drives are bad…) and you might want to purchase another one and ultimately return your current one for a refund or replacement. We have a drive that I’ve been working with that has a few bad sectors, and while it seems to write data fine, there are certain things it won’t play back and freezes up on. Here’s what I would do. You said that playback seems to occur randomly, but once it hangs up in a spot, it always hangs up at that spot (consistency always sets off a media problem in my mind, in this case the HDD). Shut down and restart your system and see if hangs up on that same frame again. If it does I would say it’s a HDD problem… if it doesn’t, then I’m not sure what it is but I’d guess it’s something to do with the interface between your HDD and your mac, like once the mac has trouble in a spot it continues to have that trouble until you reboot… I don’t know but stranger things have happened. Anyway, if the system hung up in the same spot after restart, I’d then re-capture the current clip that it is hanging up on to a different location on your hard drive (and you may want to do this step again on a different drive, maybe your external if you have enough space for one clip and havne’t had any playback trouble with it). Temporarily set a new capture scratch for that clip and recapture it, preserving the original capture. Then alter the clip linkage between the two captures. If it continues to hang up in the same spots when linked to the original capture location but not hang up at those spots when linked to the new location, then it’s definately a HDD problem. If it does hang up in the same spots, maybe it’s the strange mac-HDD interface problem I randomly came up with before, or mabye your HDD seek, read, and/or transfer rates aren’t fast enough for FCP to play back your video (depending on how much you’re doing there effect wise), or at that point it could also be a media problem coming from the DVX-100A, in which case I’d definately test it on another HDD that you’ve had success with before.

I apologize for the way lenghty post. I hope this helps in some way, or at least makes you feel a little better to know that you’re not alone.

Best,

Ben

[Kyle]

Ben and Graeme,

Wow, those posts have some great information. I had already tried capturing a clip on my external to no avail although I had not tried saving the footage on another part of the hard drive. I was interested to know more about the process of what you meant by “alter the clip linkage.” Do you mean save the same clip in two different drives or areas of the same drive and combine them together on one sequence to see whether it’s a hard drive or software problem? And also you mentioned pre and post roll changes, what are your special presets you mentioned? Is more pre or post roll better to handle timecode breaks or do you want to lessen the time for it to have less of a chance to find a break? Also, I believe IMovieHD worked because of the automatic scene detection breaking each section into individual files and bypassing chance of the breaks from happening. I was told by an audio editor at work that IMovie does not work directly with timecode as FCP does so it doesn’t care that there may be timecode issues ( I believe where Graeme was going). He also mentioned that I could save each section of each tape in Imovie and then import them into FCP as a quick time file and edit it from that although it would be a painfully long process.

Anyway, I tried your idea of turning the option of timcode breaks to wait until after capture to warn and I adjusted the pre and post roll and viola it works!!! No timceode breaks to stop the camera and no freezing of the hard drive or dropped frames on playback!! I’m very surprised that clicking that would solve all of this but so far it’s completely fine, I was able to capture an entire mini-dv tape with no problems and playback with no problems either!!! I’m not sure if I need to now bring it into Cinema Tools if it seems to playback and edit fine but If I get problems on output I guess I can try that but unless I shot it in 24P advanced I thought I wouldn’t need to touch Cinema Tools since FCP4.5 does certain needed pulldown on the fly? Anyway, it seems to be working fine by keeping a standard 29.97 timeline, clicking warn on dropped frames after capture and changing the pre-post roll , although I guess I should have subtracted the pre/post roll and not extended them but no matter it works fine…all that by clicking an icon telling you when to warn you about something….amazing!!
I did have it set to either stop capturing or to start a new clip but it always had problems until now!!! I guess eventually I would have tried that too. Thanks for all your help everyone and if I have anymore questions I know who to turn to now.

Sincerely,

Kyle

[Don Greening]

……….and that’s why I asked Graeme this morning to lend a hand with this problem of yours. The fact that Ben showed up out of the blue and dispensed his advice was an added bonus that also proved to be invaluable. I never realized that the DVX100 series cameras could be so………finicky.

Merry Christmas, Kyle. Stick by the COW and you will have chosen………….wisely 🙂

– Don

[Ben Insler]

Kyle,

Glad you got everything working, and to answer your questions you interpreted the pre/post tweaking just fine. I’ve found that you just have to play with them… sometimes you extend them, sometimes you shrink them. In terms of the linkage idea, I was merely suggesting to capture the clips in two different locatons (i.e. 2 different drives) and then reconnect the media to the new footage, test it, then reconnect it to the old footage, and test it – I guess I could have just said that in the first place… But that doesn’t matter now anyway…

I’m glad everything ended up working. Happy Holidays, and best wishes,

Ben

PS – And Don, if you read this… your call to Graeme peaked my curiosity… I just pass it up!