[Michael Kammes]

Mostly what André said.

Duplicate your sequence, and cut your sequence in half. Try an export? Does it work? Great! We know the problem is in the half you cut. Now, add in half of the half of the sequence you cut. Repeat. Do it until you find the culprit.

Do you have any gfx above 3K or 4K, in terms of frame size? I’ve often seen that cause issues….FCP no likey high res gfx.

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

HI Les-

As you’ve seen, Avid maintains a list of qualified systems, including the almighty HP Z800. Why do you want to deviate from this? Don’t! Especially graphics cards.

Failure to stay within spec may render support to be problematic, plus other ‘ghosts in the machine’. I want the best possible chance of my machine running 100%, nothing leaving something to chance when a client is in the room or I have a deadline.

I’d stick with the processors Avid recommends, the gfx card Avid recommends. I don’t believe they care one way or another on the type of cooling, but I’ve had nothing but problems with liquid cooled machines. Anyone remember the Mac Pro green goo issue?

Just so we’re all on the same page:

Below is a link to the most current specs:

Main Page for all qualified machines:
https://www.avid.com/US/products/Media-Composer/system-requirements

Direct PC Page:
https://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=362927&Hilite=windows+specifications
Near the bottom of this page is a PDF with the exact configs.

As for the future, the z800 has been out for almost 3 years. That seems a bit long to me without a refresh. I’m not sure, however, when a a refresh will come; I lost my seat on the HP board of directors recently; Twitter picture scandal.

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[Michael Kammes]

Walter, what you do is 100% awesome, and all the VARs I’ve worked at in the past 6 years have done this.

Master Build on a HDD with a clean OS and base apps installed, like FCS 3/ FCP7. Enter in master SN, perform updates. This drive is then cloned to every system that needs it. When FCP launches, it realizes that the CPU has changed, and you enter serial number. Viola. Shaves hours off system builds. Also allows for swapping of drives if you suddenly need a CPU to work as if it were another machine.

To streamline this even more, we have a hardware cloner, that clones drives bit by bit via a physical hard drive duplicator. Rock Solid. In a pinch, I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner as well.

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

Thanks for the assist David, wasn’t in front of the computer to respond 😉

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

Is all of your media on the external drive? It’s not connected via USB, is it? That’s BAD.

It sounds liek you are dropping frames because one or more of the following:

–Your media doesn’t match your sequence settings (codec, size, framerate)
–You external drive cannot keep up with the data rate the media requires
–Too many effects on the clips.

Here is the correct workflow:

Convert MTS files to ProRes 422 or ProRes422 HQ.

Edit ProRes in a ProRes timeline, either at 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080, depending on the frame size you encoded the MTS files into. To help, you amy want to ensure your AUTOCONFORM is selected in your prefs, then start a new timeline, and drop your ProRes file on the timeline. FCP will then ask if you want to adjust the timeline automatically to suit the ProRes file. This is an easy way to get your timeline settings correct.

Now, once that is done, you should be able to play the ProRes timeline back with no issue, provided you have the media on an external drive, either by some flavor of firewire, eSata, etc.

Whoever told you ProRes is not designed for playback is on crack. Is most certainly is, H.264 is NOT designed for editing.

Now, you can export whatever file you need to into any format you want.

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

With all due respect Aaron, did you read the links? Each link has discussion on different ways to solve the problem depending on your workflow.

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

So, the MTS files you are using were converted to MOV? What flavor – ProRes I am assuming?

How do you get dropped frames on export? Dropped frames is when you play in Real Time, not during export. Do you mean you get dropped frames on playback?

Are you doing all of this off an internal drive in your MBP, or an external drive (firwire 400/800 or eSata)?

What do you need to export FOR? (i.e. what do you need to deliver)

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

Verify the PT project is at 25fps.

The audio mix that you got from your sound person, load it up in QT and check the frame rate.

Do a spot check inside FCP AFTER you get the audio mix to verify it’s drift – and not just a poor offset (i.e. spot check by jumping ahead every minute or so, seeing if loss of sync is there or it only happens when playing the sequence for awhile)

Drift is usually caused by someone doing a frame rate conversion, or adding a pullup (or pull down). Since the difference is slight (and cumulative) it gets worse over time.

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

Ah yes, our old friend – the Apple ProRes gamma shift.

It’s well documented. Check out these links:

https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/12/prores-4444-colors-and-gamma-s.html

https://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=54143.0

https://www.jackjonescolourist.com/wp/2011/04/21/managing-the-quicktime-gamma-shift/

While the links (and subsequent discussions)do not focus on Avid specifically, the fact you are exporting a QT file (and using ProRes) introduces the same issue.

~Michael

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[Michael Kammes]

Dear Lord baby Jeebus, lyin’ there in your ghost manger, just lookin’ at your Baby Einstein developmental videos, learnin’ ’bout shapes and colors. I would like to please ask that FCP X be made available to VARs.

Please.

~Michael

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