How to avoid drop frames
 

Hi all,

I'm doing editing with FCP5. The footage was shot on a Sony TRV-20 dv camera which Camera B. Main camera DVX100. I put together all the clips but while playing the sequence the frames are dropping and warning message to disable unlimited RT. What should i do to avoid this. Then i switched to Safe RT but still its getting stuck and dropping frames. But i couldn't see anything bad happening to the footage because the lipsync is perfectly matching with the audio track.

Any ideas to avoid this problem.
Hari

How about some more info on your setup? What kind of Mac? Where is the footage stored? On your internal startup drive? Second internal drive? External drive (firewire or USB)?

Dropped frames are usually caused by drives which are too slow. But I've never used FCP 5, so there may be some new issues there.

drop frames
 

Apple mac G5
500gb 250+250gb
2gb ram
fcp 5 installed on frist drive and media files are in the first drive in separate directory
fcp 5

You should set your scratch disk to use the second internal drive, not your startup drive. You should also move any other project files to that second drive. It's a bad idea to capture/edit from the startup drive. Just the operating system itself contains thousands of small files, and all your other stuff generally amounts to thousands more. This sort of scenario is bad for video editing since it can lead to a fragmented disk which slows performance. The operating system and program itself also need to constantly read and write to the startup drive.

If at all possible, keep one drive devoted solely to your video files. They tend to be big files and there aren't all that many of them, therefore the disk shouldn't have fragmentation problems. You can also use an external firewire drive. Just be certain that you set your FCP preference to use this other drive and not the startup drive, which is where it will default if you don't do anything else.

See if this helps. You don't say what kind of G5 you have, but I'm assuming that it's fast enough for the job, and that the disks are the issue. Like I said, FCP 5 may have some other "gotchas," I haven't used it.

will do it
 

Yes you're right. I get it. I will set the second drive to mainly have video clips. Do we have to use the "Media manager" to point to the specific location in the second drive or is there any configuration file that we need to update. Because when i do "Log and capture" it goes to the default installation directory of FCP5 which is the primary drive.

Thanks Boyd,

Hari

Here is a great article on FCP system maintenance. Even if resetting your capture drive fixes your problem, you should still take a look at this http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...cp_jordan.html You set your capture drive, called "Scratch Disk" in Audio/Video settings.

good doc
 

Looks like a good doc to read on system maintenance on scratch disk. I will read through tonight. Thank you.