Suddenly dropped frames for no reason

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Antan,
Being H264 a codec not supported by FC, you should be happy that FC do not crash.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Anton Silver]

Well, I’ve recompressed everything using the EOS E1 Movie Plugin, and as I said before it has been working for a very long time flawlessly, and still does on my coworkers (slower) imac, and my macbook pro. The clips shows that light gray-line above them (meaning playback without rendering is possible).
So something must be wrong with my final cut configuration, somehow?

[Steve Eisen]

You are also lucky your clips played back with a usb drive. Never been recommended for FCP.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Rafael Amador]

[Anton Silver] “I’ve recompressed everything using the EOS E1 Movie Plugin, “
H Anton,
Now is even less clear which kind of footage are you editing.
H264, Prores?
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Anton Silver]

@Steve: I know, and even if the disk is 7200 rpm it’s not ideal, but sometimes you don’t have the luxury to work with eSATA or Firewire. It still dosn’t solve my problem. My 27″ iMac should not be struggling with playback when my macbook (and my co-worker’s iMac 27″ does an excellent job, just like my computer did, until recently.)

@Rafael: I’m not completely novice on the subject. My search for where the error is, is pretty simple. Since the footage seems to work everywhere else, and used to work for me, something must have happened with; 1# my machine or 2# my copy of Final cut pro 7. I haven’t installed anything lately so my guess would be that there’s something wrong with the configuration/settings in final cut, and that’s what I need help with. My iMac i7 is alot faster then my late october 2008 macbook pro so it should work better or at least to the same extent.

My footage in this problem is irrelevant, but just for the sake of this discussion it’s right now compressed with Apple Prores 4444, 23,98 fps 1920×1080. If the footage was stuttering on all machines and never worked with my system, I would not be surprised, but when it suddenly stops working, I’m starting to get afraid…

[Rafael Amador]

Anton,
If you say that you are editing DSRL footage we think that you are working with H264.
You haven’t say untill your third post that the footage is Prores 444, and this change the things.
When with normal stuff and normal operations I start to get problems without having change nothing on my computer, I run DiskWarrior. 99% of the times works.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Anton Silver]

Okay, Rafael, I’m sorry that I didn’t mention my compression of the footage earlier, it was because I didn’t think it should matter, and didn’t want to get into a discussion about something else, while, I’m in a hurry of getting projects done.

Maybe my choice of ProRes 4444 wasn’t the best, but it’s very important footage that’s going to be used for a full featured film so I wanted to get the most out of the material, maybe 422 would give me just as good result. So you think a diskwarrior operation would solve my problem? It’s worth a shoot, so I might give it a try… I’m also thinking about trying to delete the Final Cut preferences file, and see if it resets some setting that has been changed, but it worries me to try that too, if it screws something up.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for everyone else!) I seem to be pretty alone with this problem, but I guess that’s what I get from buying an imac 27″ instead of a Mac Pro 🙁

[Richard Cooper]

I would trash your FCP Preferences first and THEN, if that doesn’t solve it I would buy (and run) Disc Warrior (I think its $99… used to be anyway)

Just some info, yes for DSLR footage ProRes 444 is definitely overkill. We use ProRes444 when ingesting HDCAM SR via Dual link or ingesting RED footage when we don’t want to re-conform to RAW for specific projects, but 422 will give you everything you need for DSLR footage. Someone here, and I cant remember who, described it as putting 3 gallons in a 5 gallon bucket… you still only have 3 gallons…. hehehe

Sorry… back to your problem…. One of these should work if as you say, it works fine on other systems and used to work for you. Another possibility is a corrupted project file, which can cause all kinds of strange stuff in FCP.

Good Luck!

Richard Cooper
FrostLine Productions, LLC
Anchorage, Alaska
http://www.frostlineproductions.com

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Anton,
I live 650 miles away from the closest Apple service, and I survive thanks to DiskWarrior.
As Richard said, 444 is overkilling when your original footage is just 420. The perfect codec for transcoding would be Apple 8b Uncompress, but still makes too big files. Plain Prores is the way to go.
However Prores 444 still has quite low data rate. With your rig you shouldn’t have problem on managing it.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Anton Silver]

@Richard: Thank you soo much, in the future I’ll always compress with 422. Since this footage is going to be used for a (hopefully) upcoming film shown at cinemas here in Sweden I wanted to make sure that I got as much as I could out from the footage. Strangely enough the file size of the original clips handed to me on a firewire drive was around 1 terabyte, and when I compressed everything to ProRes 4444 the size was around 4 TB. Maybe 422 will handle it better, so, really good to know. (Took the 4444-option since it was set as default on the EOS Movie E1 plugin.

Maybe I’m bugging you with off topic stuff now, but what exactly does the “Final Cut Pro 7.0 Prefs” reset? Can’t seem to find any info online other then guides that where designed for Final cut pro 4-5.
It would be real nice to know why footage just suddenly stopped working like it always has, i’ll cross my fingers and hope that the reason for it, is buried within the preferences file!

Also, thank you Rafael!