FCP dropping frames from hard drive
 

My ginal cut has started dropping frames during render, export, and sometimes during playback. I'm pulling from my drive through a firewire PCI card to my powerbook. I'm almost to the point of reinstalling FCP and hoping it doesn't do this. I've tried recompressing before edxport, exporting without recompressing, etc. Any suggestions? I'm getting ready to do a huge project and I would really like to have this cleared up before I get into it.

Thanks!

Are you using an external firewire drive? If so, reformat the drive and be sure that journaling is turned off. Can you try a different firewire drive and see if it makes a difference?

If you're capturing to the internal powerbook drive then it's probably just a case of fragmentation on a slow drive.

Is the external drive close to full? If you have another drive, transfer the project to that drive useing Media Manager within FCP and see if that fixes it. If both drives are dropping frames thru the PCI card, it might be the card.

Thanks Guys. yeah, it seems to be geared towards one drive, but I'm actually thinking it might be the firewire cable itself. I'm going to swap it and check it out. It seems to be localized to one drive, but...it's my "big" drive, 800g...so hopefully i wont have to dish out some more green backs! Thanks for all the advice

Bryon <><

I've been doing captures to a FireWire external drive (G-Tech 250G) with HFS+/Journaled with no problems (using a Mac Book Pro). The journaling makes the file system much more reliable, so it's good to have unless you really need to eek out a little more performance. Keeping the disk under 60% capacity will do more for performance. Just my experience.

I used to leave journaling on myself, and I never had any problems capturing. However the print to video command is really finicky for some reason... I think it got worse when I upgraded from FCP 4.5 to FCP 5 in fact. I use a standalone firewire DVD recorder and the print to video command to send a full disk's worth of data. I couldn't get more than 10 minutes without dropped frames using a dual 2.5ghz G5 with fast internal SATA drive, but an external firewire 400 drive without journaling worked fine.

This convinced me - am using a dual 2.5ghz G5 with fast internal SATA drive and couldn't But like they say, "your mileage may vary."