Help! Optomization

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

There is a function in FCP that is often overlooked… and it can help with many audio and video “skipping”, “sticking” and “missing” problems.

You should “Mixdown” the Audio for playback before you dub out of FCP, or during the edit, if you have audio/video stuttering, drop-outs, sync-slippage, or freezes.

NOTE: Mixdown has even been demonstrated to help with slipping, skipping problems (or “missing” audio clips) for files being EXPORTED as QT (or similar) files out of FCP.

First, SELECT ALL of your audio tracks (highlight them) on the timeline, then:

Sequence Menu > Render Only > Mixdown.

You should see a dialog box telling you its rendering.

It might seem to make little sense that “Mixing down” even simple audio tracks will “fix” complex video “freezes” or random audio dropouts to tape or export, but it CAN.

NOTE: It does not matter of you only have one audio track, if there are random freezes during output, you should try the Mixdown.

[Quentin Block]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately it did not work in this case (although it is useful to know).
Any other ideas?
I’m really struggling with this… 🙁

[Steven Gonzales]

How big is the drive with 13 gb left? Once you get below 10 percent free (which would be a 130 gb drive) things get bad.

The best bet is to get another drive, and put the media on that. Drives are relatively cheap these days.

[13]

“I have about 13 gigs of free space on the internal drive, working from digitized clips on the same drive.”

NEVER edit video from the same drive as your system. The drive used for the OS and applications already have enough to do. Use separate drives for your media.

Also haw big is your drive, ALWAYS leave at least 10-15% of any hard drive unused.

[Quentin Block]

I think this is correct. Even playing them in Quicktime on my computer (outside of FCP) I found that the same clips were studdering in about the same spots.
I put one or 2 of these clips on another drive and they played normally.
So I am transferring everything to a firewire drive and will relink the media.
I guess it’s time to clean out and defragment the original (internal) drive that was giving me the problems? Could it be that the drive was too fragmented after extended use (and the movies were chopped up), or do you think it’s just that one needs 30% free space?
Thanks SO much for your suuggestion! I lost a lot of time but at least I can proceed…

[Quentin Block]

Oh… the drive is an internal 100 gig drive with 2 partitions (not the computer’s HD). Sorry I wasn’t clear.
So I was working off one of the partitions of about 46 gigs – 13 of which were free.
But I think it may be quite fragmented as lots of projects have come and gone (at 1 point it was almost totally full), and it’s never been defragged.
Could this cause problemms like I described?
Thanks vrey much for your help.

[13]

if the drive is partitioned then it is still the same physical drive, and it is still not good to edit from the same drive that the OS and applications are on even if it is partitioned. You are still asking the same physical drive to do more work then it can handle.

[Quentin Block]

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear again…
The G4 HD is a seperate drive – which came with the computer. It has the OS on it.
I have been working off of an additional 100 Gig Western Digital internal drive (the 2 partitions that I mentioned) which I installed later. I assume that’s OK?
However I HAVE worked off of the HD in the past and didn’t know that I shouldn’t do that. So thanks for the tip.

Are you saying not to do only video or processor intensive programs off of ther HD?

[13]

Are you saying not to do only video or processor intensive programs off of ther HD?

First off the one of the reasons I think that you have been confusing to us is that you seen to to refer to your system drive as just HD, yes it is a Hard Drive, but so are your media drives. HD is just a generic turn for hard drive.with out saying what that drive is used for can lead to confusion.

Like your last question about running processor intensive programs off of the HD. Any program must be run from a hard drive. Programs should be installed onto your system drive. Because the system drive is already running the OS and applications, it has plenty do do already. Whenever you are using large files like video or any other large media files for example, will require using them from a second hard drive or a media drive. This is because the a hard drive needs to work a little more to access large files like these, this is fine if all that drive is doing is accessing the large media files, however if you combine that with the work a hard drive must do to run the OS and applications, is just to much to ask one drive to do by itself.

This is why you should be using a separate media drive, and not your system drive for large media files.

[Quentin Block]

noted, and thank you again for your help. I really appreciate your communication.
Best Regards!