[David Scarborough]

This may be of some help and interest in regards to this problem as I recently upgrade to FCP 7 and have had the exact same problems and issues with audio and dropped frames as described in this thread.

I work with XD HD 50mb/s footage and occasionally have to mix this with DVCPro HD footage taken with a P2. In FCP 6 this worked brilliantly with no issues mixing these two formats but now on FCP 7 i’m getting the audio buzzing and dropped frames and it’s driving me crazy.

So, I took someone’s suggestion of watching the CPU meters while playing my timeline and also had a look at “All Processes” that were running on my machine (2 x 2.26 GHz Quad Core, 8 GB RAM, Leopard, eSata connected 8TB RAID).

There are three processes that are “Not Responding”. The first two are called CompressorJobController and CompressorTranscoder. I tried canceling them but every time I did it would come back on as a running process and after playing a clip in FCP they would change to “Not Responding”. I’m still researching as to what this means and how it can be fixed or if it is something that needs to be fixed.

The third process that was not responding was labelled “coreaudiod” and it operates on the root user. Again i cancelled the process and it also showed up again but this time it didn’t change to not responding. I went back to FCP and played my timeline and there were no more dropped frames and the audio no longer made the pzzzzp sound.

I’m starting to research now how this can be permanently fixed as I don’t want to have to open my Activity Monitor and cancel the process every time i start up.

Hope this helps those of you who haven’t decided to downconvert to FCP 6 as I was so nearly ready to do as well.