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not actually playing back medium quality
I’m editing 720p HD footage (Pro Res 422 HQ). My footage is on a RAID connected to my Intel Mac Tower with a FW 800. When my work bought these machines, they failed to put eSata connections on them, so I’m forced to use the 800 for now.
When I would playback my footage within it’s sequence, the video would pause every once in awhile but the audio would continue playing. I was able to solve the problem by changing my sequence playback quality to medium. I had assumed it was because of the connection with the RAID.
Well for some reason now, when I switch to Medium Quality playback, the same image freezing is happening. To make matters worse, I’m pretty certain I can tell just by looking at my playback image, that it’s not really playing back at Medium Quality, even though the option is currently checked. I’ve tried this both in Safe RT and Unlimited RT, with no luck.
Does anyone have any idea what’s going on? I trash my preferences and restarted my system but that didn’t fix anything.
Let me know what other info I should be providing you guys to help solve this issue. (And I need it solved quick! I have a deadline coming up this next Wednesday!)
Tucker Lucas
Production Manager
Heartland Poker Tour
tu****@****************ur.com -
1 Reply
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The HQ is killing you. You don’t need the 40% extra overhead for 720p footage. Just use regular ProRes and that will probably solve your bandwidth problem. Shouldn’t be any problem playing back off a FW800 raid.
I would also suggest grabbing at least a cheap tempo sata e2p. They’re less than $50. Stick it in there and at least get sata speeds. You won’t get the true esata raid benefit that you’d get from a $250-$400 sata card, but I’ve got the e2p and it suits my needs fine. You’ll get about up to 120MB/sec vs. 80 with the FW800. If you get one of the expensive cards you can get around 200 I think.
So I’m not sure about the whole medium quality thing. I’ve tried those quality settings but I seem to get the same result. Same number of streams, but less quality. Probably only makes a difference if you have multiple layers going on. Because really, if you’re doing medium quality on one stream, it would seem that FCP would actually have to do more work to process the stream as lesser quality vs. just playing the file. The drive has to read the file and pass it on in it’s entirety anyway I would think. I keep mine at unlimited and turn off all the frame drop warnings.
I’m guessing if you use regular ProRes and get a sata card all your problems will be gone.
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