-
FCP varicam 59.94 drops frames, please help
Hello,
I have been provided some footage to edit on a FW800 drive. This is the first time I’ve worked with footage from a Varicam so I am at a lost on how to resolve my issues.
I have about a dozen tape-long clips (960X720, 59.94fps). These were digitized using a 1200 using the DVCPRO HD 720p60 settings. Using the easy set up I created a sequence to match those settings. In the viewer and canvas the clip will only play breifly and stop with the dropped frame error. Here is whats interesting: they also provided me some footage shot on the sony HDCAM and had it converted/digitized using the DVCPRO HD 1080i60 compressor (at 29.97fps). I can play this footage with ease. I used panasonics FRC pluggin on the 720p60 footage (converting it to 29.97) and it could play fine (but in slow motion). This is leading me to believe it has something to do with playing back 59.94 fps.
I did a disc speed test on the firewire drive and it came up with 71MB/s read and 60.6 MB/s write, which seems fast enough of the 13.9 MB/s of DVC PRO HD.I’m using a FW800 G4, Dual 1.42, 2 Gigs of ram, FCP 4.5.
Thanks in advance,
Harv -
3 Replies
-
Something else interesting I just noticed. The clips I’m having trouble with will play back fine in the viewer if I play them from the beginning. If I pause or skip around it hangs up.
-
Here’s another thing I discovered in my problem solving journey. The frames dropping appear to be related to length. The footage that was supplied to me consist of 30 minute long clips (entire tapes). I can export a self contained quicktime (2:10:00 or less), import it and it will play back fine. Anything longer than that will drop frames. Even more ODD/INTERESTING is that I can export a quicktime reference (2:10:00 or less) and it will play back fine as well. If the problem playing back has anything to do with length, why would a QT ref work? Isn’t it just referencing the same long media? I tried subclipping shorter clips but that didn’t work.
Any thoughts?
-
A friend informed me that he had some trouble with DVC PRO HD 720p60 running on 4.5 with tiger and QT 7. He ended up reverting back to panther and QT 6.5. I decided to go the other route and upgrade FCP to 5. This seems to have fixed the problem.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up