[Givemeyourshoes]

Yes, I use the exact same LaCie 500 GB HDD at work that I have at home though. I bought two of them at the same time and use one at work and one at home. I was also having the dropped frame problems at work using the internal Seagate drive too. I have completely restored the edit system to OS X 10.4.8 and everything is working just fine. So OS X 10.4.9 mixed with FCP 4.5 seem to be the problem. We have two other edit systems with OS X 10.4.9 on them, but they are running FCP 5 and are having no issues at all. All I have to say is why to go Apple. Thanks for costing me two days work.

-Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

As you can see from the thread I had a major issue with FCP 4.5 conflicting with 10.4.9 at work, however, I am completely baffled because at home I am running FCP 4.5 on OS X 10.4.9 with no problems at all. Its on an older 1.25 G4 iMac. Go figure.

-Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

SO that fixed it. I reinstalled 10.4 and did not install the updates and it captures video just fine now. Odd how that stuff works. I am still wondering why at home I can run 10.4.9 and FCP 4.5 and not have any trouble, but at work it freaks out. How knows.

Thanks again for the tip,

Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

I am gonna try reinstalling OS X 10.4.8 and see what that does. Thanks for the tip. I will let you know if it fixes it.

-Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

Last night I went in to work and wiped the entire system. I did a fresh clean install of 10.4, and the only other software I installed was FCP 4.5. I updated both (minus the quicktime update for 7.1) and tried to capture. It did the same thing. after 38 sec. it dropped frames. I have tried all the things you listed above, and much more. I am going to bet at this point in time I have a hardware error. I guess it could be one of the updates I installed, but being that it worked just fine when I installed the update originaly, I don’t think that is the problem. I had not installed any updates for about a week or two and then one day it just wouldn’t let me capture anything. Tomorrow my boss is going to check on sending the computer to someone/somewhere for a diagnostic and possible repair. Its well out of its apple care plan though cause its 5 years old. Let me know if you figure out what caused yours. My only recommendation at this point would be to do a fresh clean install of OS X 10.4 and don’t update anything, then do a fresh clean install of FCP 4.5 and don’t update anything and try capturing. If you do that let me know how it goes. That is the literally the only thing I have not tried yet.

Good Luck,

Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

Thanks for the tip. I checked to see if the HDD was journaled or not, and it is not. However, I am about 99% sure my problem is not with my hard drive. I took my external hard drive and Sony DRS-1500a (DV dek) home to work from there for the weekend and it is working just fine. Yet, right before I left work on Fri my computer was still having the problem. No matter if I have the option to abort capture on dropped frames on or off, the clips that are captured have a drifting audio sync problem. Every 30 to 45 seconds frames are dropped and it just gets worse resulting in completely unusable clips. I have tried a bunch of stuff listed in my first two posts and nothing has seemed to work, and at this point I am pretty sure its a hardware problem, and most likely the system RAM. We added some new ram a while back and my computer has been acting a little flaky ever since. There are 2 GB in there right now, and I am going to try pulling out all of the ram and boot from one 512 at a time and see if any of them act up. If anyone else has any other ideas please let me know.

Thanks,

Nick

[Givemeyourshoes]

Since I posted yesterday, I have uninstalled and reinstalled FCP 4.5. That made no difference. In the proccess, however, I left the “warn when dropped frames” button checked. Now, every time the screen freezes up (every 30 to 45 sec) durring capture now, it gives me the old, you dropped fames error. So I did some further digging (googleing to be exact), and came accross several “what to do about dropped frames” pages, one of which was on apple’s site. Most of them all said the same thing…its your hard drive, a messed up setting. I went through all the options listed that might correct the problem I am having (with the exception of degragmenting my hard drive since it has done the same thing on multiple HDD’s in the same pattern) and still, no results. But at least now i know its a dropped frame issue.

Anyone have any ideas, I will be more than happy to post any additional info you might need.

Thanks,

Nick