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FCP4.5 CAPTURE PROBLEM-DROP FRAMES/FREEZES
Hi,
I’ve been doing “capture now” from my Sony digital8 and it’s been working fine. One day I decided to try to batch capture through logging the shots. The first clip turned out well without a problem, but when it got to the second one, it freezes on the preview (seemed to be dropping frame), then it gave me a drop frame error. After I’ve forced quit and delete the big AV- file, I restarted the the G5 and try to capture again in just basic “capture now” mode. It doesn’t capture normal anymore but it drops frames just like the previous capture.I think it might be cuz my digital8 camera is not a true playback dvdeck w/ drop frame timecode but I’m not sure. I went through all the preferences I could think of and adjusted to what I think is the right settings. I even took the advice from another post and deleted the user preference and still didn’t work.
Please help!!!
Alvin
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4 Replies
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If your media drive is getting full the transfer rates for capture will drop substantially to the point that you’ll get the ‘dropped frames’ warning.
– Don
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I’m using 2 Lacie FW 800 drives (250g and 500g), I have my project and some media on 250gig drive, and I decided to capture some more footage on the 500gig drive… I’m daisychaining the 2 drives via 800 connection, wouldn’t that be fast enough so it won’t give drop frames message? I think I will try connecting one of the drives via 400 instead of daisychaining. Hope it’ll work. But any other advice for things to look into?
AlvinSubject:
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The best case scenario is to get a firewire 800 PCI card. LaCie makes one with 3 inputs, so you can connect your 250 and 500 gig drives to the Mac on their own firewire BUS. Keeping your camera/deck separated from the media drives seems the best way to avoid 2 way communication errors that result in dropped frames, etc. Plug your digital 8 directly into the G5’s FW400 port if that’s the way you usually connect your camera (using firewire).
Whether or not daisychaining your 2 drives is going to work properly without dropping frames when they start to get full is something you’ll have to determine yourself. Either it will work or it won’t. You can get the free program XBench to carry out some transfer rate tests on your media drives. Just Google it and it’ll come up. Then you’ll know for sure if the dropped frames are the result of low capture rates or it’s something else.
Mini DV requires a minimum of 25Mbits per second, so FW400 will be fine (800 is even better) if everything is connected properly as described in the first paragraph. I’m assuming that digital 8 has the same requirements although you shouldn’t quote me on that, since I know nothing about digital 8.
– Don
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Thanks a lot Don, I’ll try test out the speed of my drives and decide from there.
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