Video playback problem

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

Have you FULLY RENDERED the entire timeline?

Also…

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.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Like Thax says, it sounds like you have not rendered your timeline. FCP is probably dropping frames and you have the warning turned off. I imagine you have rt set to unlimited and dynamic so FCP is doing it’s best to keep up but it can’t. TO remedy, go to File > user preferences and in the General tab, turn on the “report dropped frames during playback’ option. Then go to your sequence > render all and sequence > render selection menus and place a check mark by ALL if the options. After that is done hit command-r. This will render your timeline. Now try and playback and you should be good.

If that doesn’t work, make sure your canvas is set to ‘fit to window’. The easiest way to do this is to select your canvas window and hit shift-z.

Jeremy