Drop Frames....

D

DVX100Shooter

Veteran
I am trying to capture some footage and everytime it gets to a certain section of the tape my capture stops and I get the Drop Frame prompt on the screen. I turned off my external monitor and it still does this. What do I need to do now so I can get a clean capture without interruption?
 
Well, your problem seems like either the tape or the capture drive are having problems. The external monitor should have nothing to do with it.

The second is the easier one to deal with... mainly an issue of defragging or, better yet, erasing the partition/drive before capturing.

If the tape has a glitch that prevents it from reading a frame, well, that's tough. I think there's a setting in FCP that allows you to not abort on dropped frames; that'll be a good place to start, though you'll have to check your video carefully for any problems afterwards. You may also want to try capturing with a different camera/deck... they all seem to handle tape glitches a little differently, and you may get a usable result from one but not another. In an absolute worst case, sometimes playing the analog video from the DVX into another camera/deck to re-digitize the region around the glitch can help.

Also, make sure the issue is not a time-code break; FCP also has settings that toggle "abort capture on time code break" or some such (sorry, don't have full info in front of me now).
 
Forget defragging, it sucks! I think some 3rd-party utilities will do it, but I don't think OSX has anything built in. Really, partitioning is a better way to go... set up a dedicated capture partition, and wipe it regularly.

If you're not partitioned now, and have only one drive, this can be a pain to set up, but its a pleasure later. But if you have an extra hard drive or two, just back everything up, partition, and copy back. Some utilities will attempt a "live" partition of a drive without backup, but I wouldn't recommend it. Superstitious, maybe... but I use ProTools, which is ultra-sensitive to these things (and ultra-hard on drives!), and quickly helps sort out drive inefficiencies.

Can you describe your capture setup in a bit more detail?
 
I don't believe in partitioning, just get a second drive for capture scratch and render ... but, this doesn't sound like a drive problem if it happens on the same spot of the tape everytime. Maybe try putting the capture presets on non-controllable device and manouver your way around that spot with capture now ...
 
moebius said:
I don't believe in partitioning
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, what do you have against it? I'll say in advance that I agree that partitioning alone doesn't buy you the benefits of multiple drives - which I've advocated in many places here! - but even in a multi-drive system partitioning buys you a lot of flexibility and protection... the question here is not partitioning vs. multi-drives; it's more partitioning vs. defragging. No matter how many drives you have, they're still easy to clutter up...
 
I just never found any real benefit to it. I rather organize my stuff using folders which are able to grow, then a partition which when full is just full. Every time I partitioned I ended up cluttering and mixing up everything because for instance the data partition was full and the app partition had like 100Gig free. There might be some security benefits but I gave up on partitioning a couple of years ago and never regretted it ...
 
Ah, but those limits are exactly the point (aside from the ability to easily erase 'em).... if on a system drive, you can be sure something you're doing won't grow to leave you with no temp/VM space. If you're, say, simultaneously editing video and encoding another, you can make sure that temporary render files don't grow to clobber your encoding process (which is quite annoying if it happens four hours into the process!). Sure, you can buy a drive for every process, but the partitions make it easier and cheaper (I guess i should say "if you're disciplined about using them"). I find that for me, working primarily in DV, partitions of 40-60GB give me the best balance of flexibility and separation....
 
I have a total of 3 hard drives. The system drive, 1 extra internal drive and 1 FW external drive. I may have screwed up and set my system drive to capture the footage. I had the extra internal capturing video before I added Tiger to my computer. After I added Tiger back in the first part of the year I must have set the system drive to do the capturing by mistake not realizing what I had done until now. After this current project, I will switch it back.

As for the drops....I used CAPTURE NOW for everything I was importing. I unchecked the box in the settings that says abort when drop frames are detected so it will keep on capturing. However when doing this the screen on the computer will freeze for a second or 2 but the audio will continue as normal then the video will jump back to normal play. It did this on just about every time I used the capture now function.

The tapes are brand new and my deck is fairly new with little use.

The problem might be the hard drive and making sure I am not capturing to the system drive.

If I wanted to capture to my external FW drive what do I need to do? Do I have to do anything special?
 
Well, the big question you haven't answered is, does it always happen at exactly the same point on the tape? If so, the tape is by far the most likely culprit.

If on capture the video is glitching, but then going on to capture smoothly, it sounds less like HD problems and more like tape problems, too. Did you try a different deck? Do you have a monitor on the deck, and, if so, is playback smooth on the monitor while capturing? If the deck/camera shows the glitch, then it's the tape.

Also, is there a scene change and potential timecode break at the point where you have the problem?

To change your capture drive, you can use the capture settings (the rightmost one) tab in Log and Capture. There are other places in Preferences and such, too, but the log and Capture one I'm sure of.
 
I have a Sony GVD-1000 MiniDV deck. I always noticed the glitch in the Log and Capture window on the computer monitor. No glitches seen on the Sony screen or on my external monitor.
 
Ok what is the procedure for "Wiping" the hard drive? Is it just a matter of trashing files that I am not using that are taking up space? I have a couple of projects that are still in the works and don't want to move them since I am not done working on them. I just want to be clear on your meaning for wiping the hard drive or cleaning it.
 
I mean reformat... it's all the old stuff you leave, dividing your hard drive up into a lot of little clear spots that new data has to be scattered across, that causes the slowdown. This is my argument for partitions: you can reformat a partition yet leave old projects on a different partition on the same drive.... you can copy everything you want to keep to a different partition, reformat the original partition, and copy the stuff back; and the partition will have the old stuff and one large clear block of free space...


It's a weird problem though! You didn't mention if the glitches are at scene boundaries...
 
the glitches just happen whenever...no scene boundaries...

I have just figured out one problem that might have been the cause. I thought I shot the footage in 24PA and set up my timeline to remove the pulldown which was giving me drop frames and red render bars when adding clips to the timeline. This morning I put the shoot tape back in the camera and toggled through the COUNTER button to see what format I used and it said 24P so that tells me that I had my sequence set up incorrectly. I will make the change and try to import again today with hopes of no drop frames! I am importing clips from 2 minutes to 10 minutes in length per capture. It was a Hip Hop concert with 12 performances.
 
I think you still haven't answered whether the glitch is always at the same point in the tape or not...

You also don't mention what the footage looks like after the capture when the screen freezes up, then continues. What's it look like?
 
OK, hold on, I'm getting really confused....

The timeline doesn't remove pulldown, you have to do that during capture. The settings of the sequence shouldn't affect capture at all. What are your capture settings?
 
I am sorry I thought I answered that question earlier on. The footage looks normal after the glitch. The only thing that happens is the screen freezes up for 1-2 seconds then snaps back into motion like nothing happened. I tried to edit a performance last night that had several glitches and I was able to cover up the glitch with a cut away shot but you heard the glitch in the audio as it missed a few beats which threw the audio out of sync of the video. Using the razor blade tool, I cut out the section of the glitch and re-synced the audio to the video which took a few times to get it just right. Just to get that small section correct took a while and I am not about to sit here and do that to the whole concert. So I deleted all the clips and I will start over.

Yes it seems like the glitch is at the same place on the tape in terms of the CAPTURE, there is NO glitches on the tape itself.

As for the timeline. I know you can't remove the pulldown in the timeline. What I was saying is that if my timeline is not set up to match the settings of the clips then when I drag those clips to the timeline I am going to have to render every little clip everytime. I realized this as of this morning and now I have everything matching correctly so I should not have those bars for regular normal imported clips.
 
to wipe the hard drive, open disc utility, highlight the drive in question, and press erase. then you'll see a little box you can check off called "zero the drive," or something like that. you want that checked off.

that said, my i.t. dept's mac specialist was telling me the other day that with the current file system, that fragging/defragging isn't an issue the way it used to be. i always used to be a partitioning type of dude, but this guy was saying that it's not as absolutely necessary as it used to be. granted, he's an i.t. guy and not a video guy, and i'm a video guy and not an i.t. guy, so that advice migth be best served with a grain of salt.

those jvc vhs/dv decks are the bane of my existence. they seem to be especially popular in schools, where they're usually paid for by people with no video experience whatsoever. since the majority of my income comes from teaching, i have to deal with them all the time. they suck.

this glitch is sounding sort of like a tape dropout to me. i mean, you're not describing the blocky artifacts that seem to announce all of the dropouts i ever come across, but it seems like it's tape-specific. bad tapes are just a fact of life with dv, and it doesn't matter if they're new. (though you'll certainly increase the frequency of them if you re-use your tapes 5 times.)

try capturing from a different deck or camera.
 
Yeah, it definitely seems more like a tape problem than anything else. Although it's weird that nothing is showing on the monitor... but like I said, different devices/codecs handle glitches differently, so try another one!


discs o' tron - maybe "not as much of an issue", but fragmenting is always an issue, especially whenever you really need high and/or realtime throughput... but that's pretty definitely not the case here...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top