Capture problems (dropped frames)
 

I got a major problem that i can't get my head around..............

Everytime i capture footage, it goes for about 5-10mins and then comes up with 'Dropped Frames' could not capture.

Now to be honest, i'm used to this. It always happens for some reason and i just stop & re-start capture. The previous footage that i captured (up untill the dropped frames) had always been captured fine...............

But now, it's like it's deleating it, and i'm forced to start all over again. It's getting quite frustrating................

Can anybody help me?

You might want to post your configuration so we can get a better grip on your issue.

You might start by running something along the lines of AJA's KONA System Test App, to see what type of data rate your drives will support.

Dropped frames
 

Ryan /


Defrag and scandisk the capture drive.


Herman.

I thought this was a mac forum.

You could try un-checking 'abort after capture' on your user preferences.

Did you upgrade to OSX 10.4.9 ?
there are apparently some dropped frame issues with certain versions of Final Cut Pro and Express. 10.4.8 apparently does not have these problems.

I heard these issues were just when capturing to a Firewire drive, but I am suddenly having similar issues on 10.4.9 capturing SD footage to a SATA drive. Capturing HD seems to work fine.

G'day guys! ..................thanks so much for the prompt replies.

I did as you suggested Liam and it seems to have done the trick! Cheers Mate!

I might as well point it out to ya'll now, i'm self taught on FCP. I know how to edit, and all the basics of editing, but when it comes to technical stuff i'm like a little baby...............i just cry cause it's all to scary! :-(

Well hold on, just pretending there's no problem doesn't fix the problem :)

Dropped frames are evil. Very evil. You need to figure out what's happening.

What percentage of free space do you have left on your hard drive?

~Derek

Yes good point..................

on my hard drive i have 20.5gb
on my 1st hard-drive (firewire) i have 14gb
on my 2nd hard drive (firewire) i have 19.8gb

Ryan,
It sounds to me like a firewire bottleneck. If you are daisy-chaining your drives and your camera or if you're working on a laptop with both FW400 and FW800 plugged in then you may get dropped frames.

Hope that helps,

Liam.

I recently experienced this and couldn't figure out why. I tried going to external drives, internal drives, different cameras, different tape, eliminating the firewire hub, etc. All had been working fine for over a year.

Turns out that certain versions of Final Cut (both Express and Pro) will have dropped frame issues after updating OSX to 10.4.9.

Check out Apple.com to see if your versions are causing the problem.

Try using shorter cables. FW signal is not very robust. Also the performance of HDDs decreases rapidly after they are 90%full. Use media manager to archive old projects and back them up on DVD, so you can free up some space. You can also go in to all those old unused capture scratch, and render files and clear out some junk, but be careful.