Playhead delays at each cut when playing back timeline

[Scott Biggs]

Yep, you seem to have the gist of it. I AM editing using h.264 files. But I just noticed something significant:

Started a fresh project. Popped in cuts, with only the occasional minor dropped frame.

Added a fade at the beginning of the sequence. Rendered it. And voila! Now EVERY SINGLE CUT has significant dropped frames (almost a second).

Delete the fade. STILL every cut has significant dropped frames.

Restart FCP, and things are back to the way they were.

Conclusion: something happens during a render that upsets the playback. It smells very much like a FCP problem, not a codec problem, and almost certainly not a hardware issue.

Am we the only people in the world experiencing this? There have to be others.

System: imac
3.06 Hhz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1067Hhz Ram
4TB fireware 800 HD (2 disk RAID 0)
FCP 7.0

-Scott Biggs

[Blair Golson]

I’ve figured this out:

Two ways to do it:

(Note: I favor ‘Option B’)

Option A) Quick but creates HUGE files on your hard drive

Download MPEG Streamclip and transcode your files into any of the ProRes formats (which are all .MOV). Then import them into FCP. The playback delays will be gone (as FCP loves this format).

Benefits: Quick solution. Transcoding happens at 1x speed. (A 10-second clip takes 10 seconds to transcode)

Drawbacks: Transcoding to ProRes increases your file size by anywhere from 10-30x. (A 100 MB file becomes 1GB – 3 GB or larger) So unless you’ve working on a massive external hard drive, this will quickly become a problem. Not to mention that if you ever want to re-edit your project, you’ll have to keep those massive files in their massive state — forever.

Option B: Slower but doesn’t increase file size

This involves changing the pre-set settings of new sequences.

So NOTE: You can’t do this with existing sequences. You’ve got to start with a new sequence. (I may be wrong about this aspect, but I don’t know how to repair/change already-existing sequence settings in a way that will eliminate the playback lag)

1) FCP menu > Easy Setup
2) On the menu that appears, choose:
Format: Apple Intermediate Codec
Use: 720
Rate: 29.97
3) Create a new sequence
4) Edit a cut into the sequence
5) IMPORTANT: When you are prompted to change the sequence settings to match your clip, click NO. (If you click ‘Yes’ you’ll un-do everything you just did in steps 1-4)
6) Hit option/alt-R to render both the audio and video at the same time

Benefits: Doesn’t increase your movie clip sizes.

Drawbacks: The rendering process takes roughly 4x the clip length. So if you edited a 10-second clip into the sequence, it’ll take about 40 seconds to render.

Is this a pain? Yes. But I’ll take it any day over the need to fill up my hard drive with massive files (option A)

[Dennis Graves]

My fcp6 project on OWC Firewire 800 plays fine on my MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard.

But when I try to edit from the drive connected to my MacPro running Leopard, the playhead “hangs” at each clip on the timeline.

All settings appear to be identical, except for the operating systems.

Deadline forces me to finish project on MacBook Pro. Will continue troubleshooting when the heat is off.

I hope this provides more symptoms so we can diagnosis the problem and find a cure.

Dennis Graves
Mediation Movies Inc

[Dennis Graves]

On a hunch, I opened on my Mac Pro (Leopard) the fcp6 file created on the MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard), saved it with a filename xxxLeopard.fcp, closed fcp, relaunched, and the file plays fine.

So…apparently, at least in my case, a fcp6 file created with Snow Leopard hangs up on Leopard until you save it as a separate Leopard file, close the project, and reopen it.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I’m back up and running on the Mac Pro without the hangups in the timeline.

The Leopard file also plays ok on my MacBook Pro.

Strangely, however, when I open the original file that was hanging in the first place, it now plays fine on the Mac Pro. ??? I don’t have to understand it, as long as it works.

I hope this helps.

Dennis Graves
Mediation Movies Inc

[Scott Biggs]

Thanks for all your help! It was indeed the h264 codec. I had thought that my assistant editor had changed all that for me (using MPEG Streamclip), but he never got to it. Sigh. Now I am much edified.

Again, thanks for the help!

-scott biggs

[Aaron Agius]

OK we think we fixed it by going to FCP dropdown menu choosing easy setup and setting format to apple pro res 422. Effective immediately so far.
Using canon 550d .MOV files straight from camera
cheers