issue digitizing video into FCP…

[Givemeyourshoes]

Since I posted yesterday, I have uninstalled and reinstalled FCP 4.5. That made no difference. In the proccess, however, I left the “warn when dropped frames” button checked. Now, every time the screen freezes up (every 30 to 45 sec) durring capture now, it gives me the old, you dropped fames error. So I did some further digging (googleing to be exact), and came accross several “what to do about dropped frames” pages, one of which was on apple’s site. Most of them all said the same thing…its your hard drive, a messed up setting. I went through all the options listed that might correct the problem I am having (with the exception of degragmenting my hard drive since it has done the same thing on multiple HDD’s in the same pattern) and still, no results. But at least now i know its a dropped frame issue.

Anyone have any ideas, I will be more than happy to post any additional info you might need.

Thanks,

Nick

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Nick,
Do you have the externall HDs for capturing “Journaled”? If so disable the journaling and set them to “Ignore ownershup in this volumen’.
Defragmenting the HDs is not an issue as long as you got free memory enough. If when capturing the systhem drop frames is because is not fast enough to reccord all of them. Uncheck the option “Abort capture on dropped frames” and “Warn when importing non-optimized media” (this in FC 5.0.4 . In FC 4.5 “warn when dropped frames” or any other), and try to capture like that. Normally you wont see any problem in the captured clips.
just to add that I use few small LaCie FireWire 400 (200Gbs) and a laCie FW 800 with 350Gbs. I don’t know why but the FW 400s work better than the FW 800. For exampl whenever I make a “Capture Now” the FW400s start to reccord immediatly, when the FW 800 its takes few seconds to start reccording. I don’t know if is because the FW interface or because being a bigger disk the system need more time to allocate the memory or so.
Cheers,
Rafael

[Givemeyourshoes]

Thanks for the tip. I checked to see if the HDD was journaled or not, and it is not. However, I am about 99% sure my problem is not with my hard drive. I took my external hard drive and Sony DRS-1500a (DV dek) home to work from there for the weekend and it is working just fine. Yet, right before I left work on Fri my computer was still having the problem. No matter if I have the option to abort capture on dropped frames on or off, the clips that are captured have a drifting audio sync problem. Every 30 to 45 seconds frames are dropped and it just gets worse resulting in completely unusable clips. I have tried a bunch of stuff listed in my first two posts and nothing has seemed to work, and at this point I am pretty sure its a hardware problem, and most likely the system RAM. We added some new ram a while back and my computer has been acting a little flaky ever since. There are 2 GB in there right now, and I am going to try pulling out all of the ram and boot from one 512 at a time and see if any of them act up. If anyone else has any other ideas please let me know.

Thanks,

Nick

[Contrast]

First off, if you think it is the RAM, have you tried using the apple utilities on the OS X install disk? If you reboot with the DVD in the drive and hold down “option” it will boot to the tools that you can use to check if your ram is damaged.

I am having the same problem but with different hardware. Here are my specs:
FCP 4.5 (HD)
Quicktime 7.1.5
PowerMac G5
Dual 2Ghz
2GB RAM
OS X 10.4.9
Two internal SATA 250GB Maxtor Hard Drives
Sony AG-DV2500 DV Deck

This is the first time I have ever had this issue. I have:
Reinstalled Final Cut
Cleared the disks and now have 150GB free on each
Tried capturing to each drive
Tried several different tapes
Swapped out the firewire cable
Run the utilities on the OS X install DVD to check the RAM and Hard Drives
Disabled the warning about dropped frames (it then captures the video and audio out of sync)

It drops frames after only capturing 10 or 15 seconds of footage. I have used this system for almost three years now with never running into this problem before.

Looking at the software update log (Apple/system preferences/software update/installed updates) the only thing that has been installed since the last time I captured without any problems was quicktime update to 7.1.5 and Mac OS X updated (Power PC) to 10.4.9

My guess is that it is one of those updates that is causing this problem. Have you installed these updates yet?

[Givemeyourshoes]

Last night I went in to work and wiped the entire system. I did a fresh clean install of 10.4, and the only other software I installed was FCP 4.5. I updated both (minus the quicktime update for 7.1) and tried to capture. It did the same thing. after 38 sec. it dropped frames. I have tried all the things you listed above, and much more. I am going to bet at this point in time I have a hardware error. I guess it could be one of the updates I installed, but being that it worked just fine when I installed the update originaly, I don’t think that is the problem. I had not installed any updates for about a week or two and then one day it just wouldn’t let me capture anything. Tomorrow my boss is going to check on sending the computer to someone/somewhere for a diagnostic and possible repair. Its well out of its apple care plan though cause its 5 years old. Let me know if you figure out what caused yours. My only recommendation at this point would be to do a fresh clean install of OS X 10.4 and don’t update anything, then do a fresh clean install of FCP 4.5 and don’t update anything and try capturing. If you do that let me know how it goes. That is the literally the only thing I have not tried yet.

Good Luck,

Nick

[Contrast]

I posted a second reply but it hasn’t gotten up yet because I am still a new member. In short:

It was the 10.4.9 upgrade for OS X (from 10.4.8) that caused the problem and this is documented by many other people who are using FCP 4.5 or earlier and OS X.

I did a reinstall of OS X 4 and did not upgrade to 10.4.9 and it is running perfectly. I just digitized over an hour of continuous footage with no problems.

[Givemeyourshoes]

I am gonna try reinstalling OS X 10.4.8 and see what that does. Thanks for the tip. I will let you know if it fixes it.

-Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

SO that fixed it. I reinstalled 10.4 and did not install the updates and it captures video just fine now. Odd how that stuff works. I am still wondering why at home I can run 10.4.9 and FCP 4.5 and not have any trouble, but at work it freaks out. How knows.

Thanks again for the tip,

Nick

[Jack Fox]

So far the only solution is to upgrade to Final Cut 5.x or downgrade to 10.4.8. Has anyone found a solution that allows 4.5 to work with 10.4.9?

jmf

[Givemeyourshoes]

As you can see from the thread I had a major issue with FCP 4.5 conflicting with 10.4.9 at work, however, I am completely baffled because at home I am running FCP 4.5 on OS X 10.4.9 with no problems at all. Its on an older 1.25 G4 iMac. Go figure.

-Nick