[Andy Mees]

If you turn off external video monitoring altogether (Cmd F12) do you still get jerky playback in the Canvas and Viewer?
How about of you play back the same clip in Quicktime Player 7?

[Andy Mees]

That does not sound cool at all .. thats horrible. Like bad field order. YOMV.

[Andy Mees]

Ok … so at the majority of the footage is HDV 720p50 which you’ve now transcoded to Apple ProRes 720p50. The remaining footage from a variety of sources has now also been transcoded to Apple ProRes 720p50. Basically, all your footage is now Apple ProRes 720p50 … is that correct?

And you are editing this in a matching timeline. Can you confirm then that you are now having no problem with the edit … all is playing back well and looking nice in the Canvas window, no stalling at edit points etc?

You note that “I still can’t playback full screen” … Can I ask what you mean by that specifically? Do you mean in the Canvas window, in Digital Cinema Desktop mode, or is issue that you want to be able to view the edit on your external SD monitor, connected via a DV camera to the MBP’s FireWire output?

To do the latter FCP has to downscale and convert in realtime the 16:9 (HD) Apple ProRes 720p50 source to a 4:3 letterboxed (SD) Apple Firewire PAL signal. Thats quite processor intensive. Your MBP may not have the processing power to do that. You have already set your View menu > Video Playback setting to Apple FireWire PAL, correct, and have set View menu > External Video to All Frames. Do you get a stuttering output to your SD monitor or no output at all? You can try turning off Desktop playback (disable playback in the Canvas window) by going to your Final Cut Pro menu > Audio/Video Settings window and unchecking “MIrror on Desktop” under Playback Output in the A/V Devices tab. This may allow you to get a watchable realtime downconvert, but it may not be ideal …

… And this is where those I/O boxes you’ve been reading about come in to play, thats what they are for .. they allow you to monitor your HD output directly from FCP to a suitable monitor without asking FCP to perform complex signal conversions, the I/O box does that for you. Unfortunately you need to be able to connect them to your Mac. Laptops are somewhat hampered by a lack of expansion options. Connectivity for the next generation of laptops looks promising with the newly announced “Thunderbolt” connection across the whole line of MBP’s. But for older models you’d generally want a MBP with an ExpressCard slot .. that gives you access to the most affordable portable I/O options to date. Does your 15″ MBP have an ExpressCard slot … or is it one with an SD card slot? If it doesn’t have an ExpressCard slot then you still have options, but they will be more expensive. The AJA IoHD is a superb device that hooks up via FW800, similarly the Motu V4HD. Or the Matrox MXO (not MXO2) which connects using the DVI (or to Display Port via a DVI adaptor).

Hope this is helping to clarify what may be the problem, and some possible options to consider for either now or later.
Cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

The AJA utility is measuring performance in MB/s … thats Mega Bytes per second
The ProRes white paper is stating speeds in Mb/s … thats Mega bits per second

If your Taurus drive is measuring 70 MB/s that is equal to 560 Mb/s (1 Byte = 8 bits) … thats not bad for FW800 which gas a theoretical limit of 800 Mb/s (100MB/s).

[Andy Mees]

You’re on 🙂

So lets start at the very beginning. What are the delivery requirements? You’ve got a variety of footage from mixed sources, DVD, DV, HDV and others? How much of each? I note you’ve scaled up the majority to 1280×720, an HD resolution … and scaled down the HDV to match that. Do you need to be doing this?

Regarding the playback via Firewire … your current sequence setting is H264 1280×720 but your Video playback setting is Apple Firewire PAL, this means that FCP is trying to convert the footage between formats in realtime for your external video playback whilst simultaneously handle the display to the Canvas window … but your machine just doesn’t have the computing power to do that, thats why you are not getting smooth playback in either the Canvas or the monitor. If your source and sequence codec were less processor intensive then you might have better luck, but its still not going to be pretty.

Hope this is a good start.
Andy

[Andy Mees]

No worries Michael, and genuinely no offense was intended … I started to try to answer your thread earlier and as I worked through it it just seemed to get funnier and funnier inasmuch as you had seemingly gone out of your way to do absolutely everything wrong. It got to the point where I search back through some of your earlier posts … those showed you were not a complete beginner, so it suddenly occurred to me that you had posted here with the most outlandish scenario that you could think up purely for the entertainment value in watching the responses. Apparently I thought wrong! You gotta admit, looked at it from that angle it was pretty funny 🙂

[Andy Mees]

[Tony Sarafoski] “Are there other options/solutions that can be suggesed?”

You might try unchecking “Scrub High Quality” in the RT menu. When this option is deselected, video displayed in the Canvas is determined by the current Playback Video Quality setting … switch that to Dynamic and that should allow you to improve responsiveness during scrubbing.

[Andy Mees]

Scott Simmons just rediscovered the “Change Speed Segment” tool over on his blog
https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/ssimmons/story/quicktips_2011_day_31_fcp_change_speed_segment/

[Andy Mees]

ProRes 444???? That might be a bit unnecessary for your Flipcam footage Amber, ProRes 422 LT might be a better choice … but the particular ProRes codec choice for your source should not be the problem here. Can you double check your sequence, put the playhead at the start and then press the “end” key (or choose Mark menu > Go To > End) … is your playhead where you expect it to be? If not then it could be that you’ve a stray frame 2 minutes past the intended end of your sequence. Stranger things have happened, and its worth looking. Failing that, please post back with complete details (screenshots?) of your source footage format properties (select a clip and press Cmd-9), and similarly for your sequence settings (press Cmd Zero).

Cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

[Miranda Raimondi] “Though I can address this with my collaborator in the future, for now, I really should continue to work with the material that I have.”

I’m sorry Miranda but I’m not at all sure that this is wise. Yes, you should certainly address this with your collaborator in the future, as between the two of you, you seem to have invented a Frankenstein format which is not working well. According to the info you posted in the earlier document, the Compressor (codec) of your footage is “None” with a data rate of 39.6 MB/s, but the filename extension is clearly “.dv” … which seems to suggest you have somehow wrapped the footage up and are presenting it to FCP as a DV transport stream. Not good. I don’t quite know how or why you managed to arrive at this point but my advice would be to fix this before you dig yourself in any deeper. Rewrap your footage as a regular Quicktime Movie file, and at the same time you would do well to reencode it using a compressor that is more fully supported for “RT” in Final Cut Pro … I would recommend you choose Apple ProRes 422.

[Miranda Raimondi] “After rendering, those objects appear to occupy the same z-space.”

I would suggest that that is entirely as one would expect … you are after all (for the time being at least) working in a 2D medium. If you have multiple items being composited in a single scene, the act of rendering does indeed “flatten” them.

[Miranda Raimondi] “As I also mentioned in the attached pdf document, merely opening the sequence attributes seems to cause final cut pro to reinterpret the source material as if it were rendering the source material. Strange.”

Yes, that one certainly is rather bizarre. I’m guessing that your system is struggling with this strange footage and that the RT engine is therefore dropping to a lower resolution which is causing elements of your footage to appear to disappear during some playback operation. I would hesitantly suggest that you need to understand that FCP employs more than one potential rendering path (software or hardware), and that it also employs more than one potential display path, being RT and non-RT. I say “hesitantly” only because this is not at all the kind of understanding that any normal user of the software should want or need to understand. If you are work with supported formats, then the software will work exactly as you should expect it to work. If not ….

But I digress. You’re not coming across at all as regular user at all, and I believe I’ve already made the point that you should fix your workflow, not go on a wild quest to understand the inner workings of FCP … but yet much of that inner workings info is no secret so I’ll cut to the chase:

The RT Display Path

During normal operation, the RT engine is responsible for updating the video displayed in the canvas window and on any external monitor. The RT engine is engaged during playback and during “scrubbing.” In some circumstances, sequences cannot play back in realtime on all machines. When this happens, the RT engine can adjust quality in several ways in order to maintain reasonable playback performance (Low/Medium/Dynamic).

The Non-RT Display Path

In addition to the RT engine, Final Cut has another display path which is sometimes used to draw video to the canvas window and external devices. This display path predates the RT engine, and is used for certain display options which aren’t supported by the RT display path. Unlike the RT engine, the Non-RT display path does not display the same image in both the canvas window and the external monitor. When updating a frame, the Non-RT engine renders an image for display in the window, and then renders another image later to send to the external monitor. The external monitor is updated at idle time, so if you are scrubbing quickly you may notice that the canvas window updates more frequently than the external device.

One of the things that forces a clip down the non-RT display path is having Show Excess Luma or Chroma enabled … try enabling that (press Control Z) and see if that changes what you see in the Canvas window. Then again, that won’t work because if your format. “None” is not supported for the RT display path.

Hope we’re getting somewhere
Andy