Dropped Frames Issue!!!!! PLEASE HELP

mb72378

mb72378

Well-known member
I have had my Imac (2.9 Dual with 4GB ram) for about a month with the new final cut studio installed. I have been working with DVCPROHD since then beautifully!! All of a sudden, Final Cut wont play more than 2 seconds of video before stopping due to dropped frames. This is maddening. I started a new project just to see if the length of the first one was the problem, but to no avail. Even the 30 second clip I imported dropped frames every 2 seconds or so. Someone have any idea as to what is going on? I have this project due soon and I can't edit because of this!!!!!

A little info. I edit off the main hard drive. So I tried editing a clip off my firewire800 external drive and it still drops frames.
 
I just went through this as well. Render the video and audio with Sequence>Render all>both

That should fix the issue.
 
All of the video is rendered. I render it right after I make an edit. Restarting the computer resolves the issue for about an hour.....any ideas?
 
I tried:)

You need someone with more experience and knowledge- hope they come along for you soon...
 
1. It should NEVER be on your physical system drive. I would hope it's a FW800 drive. And it's good to make sure that it's a SATA drive enclosed inside that external case. Some earlier LaCie drives have FW800, but they were actually PATA IDE drives inside the enclosure. So speeds were not full FW800 capable due to that.

2. How full is that hard drive? Drive performance speeds do slowly get slower as they fill up with storage. You really can notice falling transfer speeds when a drive starts to get half full. If too full, you can really slow down it's performance.

3. Render scratch disk a separate physical drive as well? Again this should not be on your system drive. Only project files and programs should reside there. ( being backed up by Time Machine no less. ) You could use your video storage drive as a render storage drive as well, but It's better to keep that on a separate drive too.

4. Doubling that RAM won't hurt. If you got to many programs open, you could be hitting the system drive as a page file instead of using the much faster RAM. Try closing a few that are not being used much. I know Firefox is an awesome browser, but it can be a real resource hog.
 
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Ryan,

I must not have enough posts to send PM's yet? Anyway, I tried to send you the following:

Ryan,

I'm a newbie so please bear with me.

I have a new MacBook Pro with 2.8 GHz processor and 4GB of storage. I'm using FCP to edit weddings and other misc stuff.

I have been using my internal hard drive for all purposes while editing.

I am going to heed your advice and get an external drive for storage. Can you give me specifics on a good setup for my needs? 1TB? More?

I only have one firewire input on my MacBook- how would I install a scratch drive along with the storage drive if I decided to go that route?

Thanks very much,

Jim

Sorry for the threadjack mb.
 
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