[Paul Escandon]

Are the sequence settings of your timeline properly matched up with your footage? That’s something I would check into. When you drag a clip onto your timeline is there a colored bar over the clip telling you that it needs to be rendered or is not supported in real time? If so, then your sequence settings are off.

Also, have you tried trashing your preferences since this problem started? I would do that just to see if that might potentially help.

And oh yeah – the two settings are Unlimited and Safe RT. When I said dynamic I was referring to the video quality and playback quality in that same dropdown menu from the timeline that allows you to set either to dynamic – which means final cut will throttle these settings on the fly when it sees fit.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

You can try as an alternative to that method (which definitely should work.. not sure why it’s not) exporting an XML file from Final Cut 5 and importing the XML file into Final Cut 6. You can do this from the File > Export and File > Import commands.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

You can get a live feed by hooking up a DV camera up via firewire and opening up the log and capture window. You can do a quick capture now to grab video from your feed (it will be more than 1 frame but that shouldn’t be a problem). Make sure the device control preset is set to non controllable device or else the capturing might not work as it will be waiting for timecode.

There might be other tools to grab single frames from firewire but since this is an FCP forum that’s the only way I know to do it from FCP.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

Hey there,

I have a much easier way for you.

1. Open up the export queue (Window > Export Queue)
2. Drag the clips either from your timeline or browser into the export queue.
3. Click the settings button in the export queue and check the Use Item In/Out box.
4. Export.

You’ll have new files just using the In and Outs you assigned in the clips.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

By the way it’s in User Preferences > General tab to turn “report dropped frames during playback” back on.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

I would say it’s generally a bad idea to not see when you have dropped frames during playback – for the precise reason that you are now experience. When there is a dropped frame you generally want final cut to stop playing so that you can address the problem. Sometimes this simply means rendering. Sometimes this means changing your RT settings to something like “Dyanmic” – and sometimes this might indicate a different problem such as drive speed or even a corrupt file or something more severe.

When you aren’t warned of dropped frames often your audio will be out of sync and from the moment where the dropped frame occurs you will have major issues.

I would turn that setting back on – address the dropped frames problem when they occur and go from there.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

Have you considered the possibility that this problem is with your footage? If that’s the case then it’s going to be a long process of trying to clean it up.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

The quick steps to downgrade Quicktime 7.4 to Quicktime 7.3:

https://www.paulescandon.com/blog/?p=39

(All the info was taken from a large thread in the AE forum but it can be hard to figure out what steps to take in long threads so I made it just a few paragraphs)

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

[That’s what I get for not having a laptop, I guess. Is it then standard practice for a laptop to have a separately-partitioned System Drive? I honestly don’t know….]

No actually they just come with one partition like a desktop Mac.

What I was getting at was that all he said was that he’s out of space on his system drive and he never mentioned where he keeps his media or indicated how it got that way other than talking about the OS and applications. Laptop hard drives are usually significantly smaller than desktop hard drives so it’s a lot easier to run out of space with a Final Cut Studio install. I just assumed he would work from an external and if not then he should definitely heed yours and walter’s advice – but that wasn’t the question and it seemed like you were writing it off.

I think that Mainenance automator application is a good start though.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[Paul Escandon]

He never actually mentioned storing media on the system drive – he’s just saying that with applications and OS installs alone he’s running out of space – not an uncommon occurrence for mobile users.

Anyhow – I would recommend this automator action called Maintenance – it can free up space that you’re wasting in temp directories that you might not know about. It’s easy to run and I’ve used it with no problems before: https://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

Peace!

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD