Playback on timeline dropping frames FCP5

[Matthew Brunn]

What format are you playing? DV, SD 10bit, HD? It makes a difference. How full are the drives? Is this hooked up via 800 mb firewire? Did it just start doing this? Have you installed anything lately? Updates? Are the dropped frames always in the same place?

Hope this helps-
Matthew
Quad 2.5 G5
OSX 10.4.X
Ram 4GB
FCP 4.5/AE 6.5/DVDSP3

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

Questions like this are posted very frequently. And many (most?) of the problems are solved by a simple procedure.

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.

[Ed Stevens]

Thanks for the response.
Drives are FW800 G-raid. Approx 25% full. This just started. I upgraded to tiger and FCP5, but I did other projects with no problem. My footage is from DigiBeta 8bit uncompressed taken in YUV.
Same as I always did. My drive speed test on the BM Decklink reads,
Read 72, Write 78. I does not stop at the same place all the time. I restarted a 8 min piece on the timeline and it was fine. the next pice on the TL was 6 min and it stopped 4 times.
ED

[Ed Stevens]

Thanks for the advice. If I do a mixdown, will I still be able to have tracks out putted separately. e.g. My narration is one 1 track
and my backeground or NAT sound is on another. Why would this have not happened before?

ED

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

Mixdown will not affect the audio or the way it sounds or looks on the timeline in any way.

Don’t worry about it at all.

Just try it and see if it works for you.

[Ed Stevens]

Thanks. Will do.
ED

[Kevin Monahan]

The other thing is to get a PCI card with FW 800 I/O and put your GRaid on that separate bus.

Kevin Monahan
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fcpworld.com