Please help!

[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 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.

[Julie Bigford]

I’ve mixed down the audio, I’ve rendered the whole project, trashed the render files, re-rendered it, re-mixed it down…etc. Thanks for the suggestion! Any other ideas?

[Paul Bruneau]

Is your media stored on a drive other than your operating system?

[Julie Bigford]

Nope, it’s all on the same drive.

[Steve Courtney]

That’s almost certainly your problem. You should always store your media on a different (usually external) drive, while running your OS and FCP from your internal drive. That way your computer isn’t trying to access the internal drive to play the video files while also trying to access the drive to run Final Cut.

You should also be careful where you save various files, such as Livetype files and jpgs or whatever stills you’re using. These should be stored on the external drive, too, as they will cause random frame drops when the computer has to access items you may have saved to the desktop while you were in a hurry.

I’m betting that if you drag all your video assets to an external drive, and reconnect to their media, you can lay off the project without any further problems.

Good luck.

Steve

[David Roth weiss]

Julie,

Check the drive out below from http://www.newegg.com, you can’t get a better price anywhere, and you’ll be able to install it in your G5 easily yourself just by following the instructions in your user manual.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144185

DRW

[Neal Broffman]

You can also try exporting your timeline as a self-contained movie and then reimporting the movie and playing it out to your deck.

[Bret Williams]

[Steve Courtney] ” You should always store your media on a different (usually external) driv”

Whoa, not if it’s a FW 400, or even 800 drive. An internal ATA is much faster than the FW400 external, and an internal SATA is way faster. It’s even a little faster than the FW 800 external.

[Blackduck]

Maybe no help but this was our experience. We were doing a 20 minute HD project on FCP and had the same problem. The suite uses external drives, has a dual processor G5 loaded with ram up the wazoo (8 G) and still it would not play without dropping frames… we tried everything..then for no particular reason we ditched the color bars and the timeline played out fine. (Coincidence? maybe but since then bars have become an optional extra)

[Blub06]

Neal said (You can also try exporting your timeline as a self-contained movie and then reimporting the movie and playing it out to your deck.)

That