video stalling and skipping a everything else that can go wrong !

[Arty Gold]

sorry…
also i’m using
a g-5 dual 1.8 with 3 gigs or ram

[Jonathan Miller]

Frustrating, isn’t it! You’ve put all this work into producing the thing, and it’s just how you want it. Now, you can’t get the thing output and therefore can’t deliver it. Uuuugggghhhh!

Alright, have you tried making the entire piece into a self-contained movie, and then printing to tape from that single movie?

A lot of times that will solve your problem.

Good luck!

Jon
TreeLine Productions
Fort Collins, CO USA

[Walter Biscardi]

Maxtor is not a drive I recommend to anyone who is doing serious video work, that is, you’re earning your livlihood from your work. LaCie, G-Tech and WiebeTech are all good firewire drives for A/V work.

A lot of dropped frames comes from two things: drive speed and media management. Drive speed depends on the connection, how fragmented a drive is and the drive itself. On the Media Management side, if you have your media spread out too much on the drive, then that can cause dropped frames. I’ve seen people create multiple folders for media from a single project on a drive and FCP can drop frames.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[John]

Hi Walter – so, if I have a lot of media for a project, and I have a lot of different folders for that media for organizational purposes – (even though all the media resides on 1 drive), I will get dropped frames?

[Steve Courtney]

I was having the same problem at one time, and was tearing my hair out trying to figure it out. Then I realized my scratch-disk had been inadvertently set to my main hardrive, the same one that was running the FCP app. D’oh. All my renders were trying to play off the main internal hard-drive. No wonder I was getting playback errors.

Also, you might check on the locations of any stills you might be working with. A lot of times people drag jpegs or picts or whatever onto their desktop, and FCP has to access the main hard-drive to get to the media, while also trying to run real-time video. That can be an invitation to Dropped-Frame City.

Good luck,

Steve
FCTV

[Steve Courtney]

[Walter Biscardi] “Maxtor is not a drive I recommend to anyone who is doing serious video work, that is, you’re earning your livlihood from your work. LaCie, G-Tech and WiebeTech are all good firewire drives for A/V work.”

Any specific models you’d recommend, Walter? I still need to buy a replacement drive or two, and don’t want to waste any more money. I was leaning toward the LaCie BigDisk Extreme 500GB. Is that a good use of my resources, or should I get a 160GB and wait for prices to go down?

Steve

[Kevin Downer]

Walter, not to pick but just to clarify your previous statement one of your selected manufacturers:

“Maxtor is not a drive I recommend to anyone who is doing serious video work, that is, you’re earning your livlihood from your work. LaCie, G-Tech and WiebeTech are all good firewire drives for A/V work.”

Lacie is just providing a metal housing for the drive. It’s not a drive manufacturer.

Lacie in many cases uses Maxtor drives in their cases. I just had my older FW Lacie die on me recently. After opening it, it uses a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. Take one apart sometime. The only shock absorbing thing in the case is a little crappy foam strip. That nice vent hole in the back? There is no fan in it so it’s useless and purely cosmetic…like the rest of it. Probably why it runs so quietly though. 😉

You might think about going SATA external or internal as it seems to becoming the next best thing to SCSI for its price point and will help with the hiccups.

If you need to stay FW, I would suggest grabbing a Mercury Elite Pro enclosure and then get the drive of your choice to stick in it.

I learned my lesson from my recent HD crash.