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Final cut stuttering
Hi
I am editing in a ProRes LT 422 time line using ProRes LT material 1920 x 1080p. This is on a Mac pro Quad-Core Xeon with 6GB DDR3 and a 4TB esata stripped raid, using OS x10.6.4 and Final Cut 7.
I have been suffering from intermittent playback issues since this project started, it has been inconsistent whole sequences playing through perfectly then not. Changing the RT and quality does make a difference but again not consistently.
Then I started to look at the front slate which is made up of a B/W jpeg and several layers of none animated text. this is the only material in any of the sequences that was not prores. Re formatting them as a prores movie and limiting the layers to two levels of text appears to have stopped this stuttering. But I am not convinced that its that stupid! has anyone else seen this kind of behaviour is my fix a real fix or am I missing something else.
Thanks in Advance
Steve -
5 Replies
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A large jpeg still can cause problems in FCP. You would be better to render your entire slate as a prores movie and put that back in the timeline, or render the still layer as prores as a minimum. None of this should cause playback issues elsewhere in the project – I suspect, jpeg or not, that this is a red herring.
Can I ask how large the project is? How many sequences do you have open? Large projects in FCP often become unwieldy and cause stability issues. Otherwise, this could be an issue with the array (particularly the eSATA adapter you use to communicate with the array) causing playback issues. Try elimiinating potential issues (different drive array – any firewire or internal drive should play LT no problem) or copying material to a new project. Only by doing this will you get to your specific issues.
Ben
Edit Out Ltd
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I have been rendering the slate out as prores to get around this issue.
The jpeg is 1920 x 1080 RGB image so I would not call that large and yes I agree I am not convinced that this issue is symptom of a bigger issue. At present my sequences are no longer that 10 minutes but they will get bigger and generally I will only keep 3 or 4 sequences open at any one time. The esata raid performs faultlessly and to eliminate this as a issue I used the internal raid 0 disk set and this gave the exact same results.
I have re set my user preferences, tried several test projects, remade the jpeg and it still seems to be the the one consistent point at which things brake. Ordinarily I would maybe claim that as a fix but I was hopeful that some one else would have seen this behaviour to confirm my findings -
I should mention that I have two identical final cut machines and a third that is running OS X 10.5 with Final Cut studio 3 with a AJA Kona LH card. I have just run the test on this machine and again it drop frames on the jpeg slate but does not continue to stutter as the other 2 machines that do not have a video card. Does this mean that I will need to consider a video card to handle the encoding better?
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Steve, I have the same problem with multiple machines. Restarting FCP sometimes flushes the problem otherwise I restart. It not a drive problem or ram problem. It started with FCP 7 or Snow Leopard and I did clean installs. I had a prores timeline that was clean then I opened a native 30p timeline and it staggered, I went back to the prores and it still played clean. It seems to creep back in when you work in other apps while FCP is open. Pls. let me know if you find a fix.
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I did. Though I had been assured that the base nvidia GT 120 graphics card was all that was required in these machines, that is not the case. If you look on the apple site they are no longer selling the new mac pro’s with the GT 120. I went with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and all the issues went away
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