dropped frames

sonic freak

sonic freak

Well-known member
i just had my ram upped to 1.5 GB SDRAM on my PowerBook G4 and I'm still getting the 'dropped frames' prompt. What gives?

It says a few things, one of which i did- increase the speed of my system. the others are lowering my compression data rate, turning of unlimited RT..

I just have open a simple movie idea with like five clips. the thing won't even play back w/o stopping after a few seconds..

any help out there?
 
Biggest cause of dropped frames is usually the disk your capturing too or playing back from. What kind of disk are you using for the above ie whats your capture scratch disk.
 
I'm using my laptop powerbook G4, and I have an external hard drive, and that it's.

I spent 200 bucks upgrading the RAM and it's still working like crap. In my viewer, the frame i'm editing skips.

The capacity on the G4 is 74 gigs, and I only have 4 gigs free. Could that be it? I asked my mac guy about that but he didn't tell me anything.

thanks for responding!
 
You could probably do with a bigger internal drive but i am assuming your using an external firewire drive also what kind of footage are you trying to edit. And how many streams are you editing ie. how many layers of video are you playing back at a time in fcp and what kind of footage is it.
 
first of all, thanks for responding.

the footage i'm trying to edit is just of a golfer I shot. He's a pro looking for sponsorship dollars. I thought I'd shoot something like a trailer or an electronic press kit.

How many streams? Not sure what that means.. But I'll try: I imported quite a few clips, but not a huge amount at all. And I'm only editing them one at a time. So i guess I'm only playing back one layer or video at a time.
 
it's gotta be something with my G4 but it just got serviced and checked all the way through and amped up in RAM?

Maybe it's that my G4 hard drive capacity is full. 74 gig available, 3 gig free.

Would that be it?

I should be paying you...
 
No I mean what kind of codec have you shot on eg DV, DVCPRO, DIGIBETA. I assume because you don't know what i reffered to in my previous post that your shooting on miniDV as this is a DVX forum and your probably using that camera. Streams means how many amounts of footage are you playing back at the same time. Look at your timeline in FCP if you have say 4 video layers stacked on top of each other (for example your doing a picture in picture effect like the TV show 24) then your playing back 4 streams.
 
Try closing any open sequences you are not using and empty the trash. This helped me with dropped frames.
 
Yeah, dvx100b, miniDV. Only playing back one stream.

My external hard drive is a MAXTOR 120GB. Spin rate 7200RPM. Yes, all of my media is on my external hard drive because my laptop G4 was getting full. So I moved it to the MAXTOR. Then I just import small amounts of video to edit, but it skips and jumps and then shows that dropped frames message.

Thanks to all for comments
 
Get a new external drive if I was you sounds like it's faulty. Try this on it
http://www.aja.com/html/support_kona3_swd.html

then scroll down and download AJA kona systems test. Run it on your external maxtor drive and report back with findings. And freeing up some room on your internal drive wouldn't hurt. Drives tend to start choking when their over 70-80% full.
 
external hard drive= write 29.1 MB/s -- read 34.5 MB/s
powerbook G4 drive= write 19.4 MB/s -- read 22.6 MB/s
 
Are the reads and writes consistant. When you check the graph tab is it a failry straight line or does it go up and down.
 
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