What am I doing wrong with FCP and the 7d?

J

jrod81

Veteran
I used Mpeg Streamclip and converted everything to ProRes (the bottom one because I understood that to be HQ- which might be overkill but please don't make this thread about that). Now when I watch the clips in the viewer window to set my in and out points, the footage is still studdering and splurtting and other professional words to describe the inability of smooth playback...
Any thoughts?
I am using a 2.2 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro so it seems that should be plenty to handle this footage right? No other programs are running either?
thanks
jared
 
Other possible contributing factors:
1. Using a WD 500GB Studio passport external HD, however, I cannot locate the firewire 800 cord so I am using USB 2.0- perhaps the communication between HD and computer is lagging.
2. I am using FCP 6.0
 
Yeah, on my old white macbook, pro res footage always plays back choppy in quicktime player, but it runs smooth when it's on a proper timeline in FCP
 
ProRes is 20 MB/s a stream

You need an external firewire drive to get smooth playback.
USB is terrible for constant video playback.

That's your issue i'm 100% sure.
 
Paul Jay said:
ProRes is 20 MB/s a stream

You need an external firewire drive to get smooth playback.
USB is terrible for constant video playback.

That's your issue i'm 100% sure.
Click to expand...

I had choppy playback on a firewire 800 drive because of CU spikes until I turned my playback quality down to medium. You are correct that USB 2.0 sucks on macs. It takes up a ton of CPU overhead compared to firewire.
 
that's strange...because i run all my pro res media off a usb hard drive through FCP and it plays just fine...on my non-pro macbook no less
 
i have a powerbook g4 running fcp 6.0. i DL 7D mov files. used Compressor 2 to transcode to PRORES 422 (non HQ- progressive one) and then played mov files in QT with no stutter.
 
whatever happened with the viewing on the ps3 anyway jrod? did you just decide to forgo it and just transcode everything to prores immediately without those intermediary steps? I'm guessing if you decided to go with prores hq that you're not hurting for hard drive space.

how much ram do you have by the way? prores hq is actually harder to play back than standard prores (higher bitstream)
 
still be viewing on my ps3 and then bringing in the clips i want to use but i have to still mark my in and out points... it is off and on choppy- sometimes it is fine and sometimes its choppy... i will move the quality down to medium and see how that works
 
Getting a G-RAID solved my problems, smooth as butter playback via eSATA from my macbook pro. And they're cheap! $250-350, for 1 or 2TB respectively.

Sustained >200MB/sec
 
jrod81 said:
still be viewing on my ps3 and then bringing in the clips i want to use but i have to still mark my in and out points... it is off and on choppy- sometimes it is fine and sometimes its choppy... i will move the quality down to medium and see how that works
Click to expand...

did you ever wind up using the quicktime pro trick of just changing the extension name and metadata? it really wasn't as complicated as it sounded (even using automator)
 
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