Frame drops in FCP

[HDkilledFILM.]

I was shooting this weekend on my feature and we were using FCP to capture direct into my G4 laptop. We were not able to capture into the program using the uncontroalbe device/ 1080i 60fps settings. I have fcp 5.0.4 and a 1.67ghz laptop with 1 gig of ram, any suggestions?

[doccutter]

What is the speed of your internal drive (I assume that's what you were capturing to)? If it's 4200 RPM, fahgetabowtit. I think you're going to need a 7200RPM drive for direct captures, maybe a 5400 will work, but I wouldn't count on it. I know that when I replace this powerbook, the new one will have the 7200 RPM drive. You might want to free up space on the drive as well.

[ullanta]

Look... forget any internal drive. It may be possible, but will never be as reliable as an external drive. By nature, various parts of MacOS X and any application(s) you're running will sporadically be accessing the system drive. This adds a pretty random occasional slowdown into the equation. Record critical live streams to a drive that will not be accessed by any other process - it's this "seek time" between different parts of the drive as different processes look for different things that's the biggest performance issue.

[Hawkeye]

Mm, just a thought but if you were using the powerbook it may have been the SMS (sudden motion sensor) kicking in if you were moving the pb around with the camera? Just a thought but try disabling the sms and see how it works.

[myfriendimage]

fahgetabowtit.

haha Im sorry that was really funny.