“Stuttering” problem with HMC150 footage

[Daniel Schultz]

Here’s my sense. It seems to be a playback issue. Perhaps quicktime has trouble playing back the prores files from the 150. The frames are all there, from what I can tell. Is this something that will get fixed on newer versions of quicktime? It is annoying, I agree.

Dan S.

[Al Bergstein]

So you haven’t said whether you are doing your editing on the same drive as your OS. If you are, stuttering is often (not always) caused by competing with your OS for disk access. And moving it off to an external drive might not solve the problem if you move it to a USB drive. The recommended setup for high def on all platforms (as I’ve read it) is e-SATA or Firewire drives on a drive OTHER than the OS boot drive. If you are trying to do editing on the boot drive or on USB you will likely encounter stutter. Does that seem to point in the right direction? Or ?

An example of this is that Pro Tools for audio editing specifically states that they will not support anything other than what I stated above. Everything I’ve read about editing video also seems to state that you should follow the procedures I’ve outlined above. I have my OS on the primary internal drive, FCP on a RAID 1 array, and raw footage on another Firewire drive. No stuttering. Ever.

Any other ideas? Thoughts?

Alf

[Jon Bothun]

I have had a 150 for about 9 months and never had an issue like this. One thing I would check is if the extra graphics card is turned on. To check this you go to your apple preferences and under the energy saver icon make sure you check “higher performance”.

My work flow from avchd has been to dump the avchd to an external drive (7200rpm with an 800firewire port) and trans-code the footage to prores422 back on to that drive in a separate folder and edited in fcp from that. Has worked like a charm.

Also, no reason to to use proresHQ unless you are working in a 4:4:4 color space, which you most likely aren’t due to the 4:2:0 color space native to the 150.

Good luck!

[Corby Anderson]

Alf –

My edit system set up is: I run FCP, installed on the Mac HD, with my footage flowing to capture scratch on a 2 TB external array connected via ESata.

I currently ingest 150 .mov’s using Log and Transfer, importing into my bins and to the Capture Scratch on the ext. HD at the same time…

I will check into the Prores 422 codec and see if that is the issue…I swear that I can see the hiccups in the camera as I record though. I think the thing just gags…
C