Capturing problem with FCP3
 

While capturing audio and video footage the video footage will pause for a few seconds on the computer screen but the audio will not pause. Everything looks good on the external monitor. When the footage is brought into the timeline, the audio and video come in together but the audio is not in sync with the video. The audio and video tracks also do not move together when I want to adjust them in the timeline. This is a new problem I have with FCP3. I have heard that this version is full of bugs but this has never happened before. Any suggestions?

Thank you

Gary

From your description it might be a video dropout on the tape or an issue with a hard drive which can't keep up. Doing a long capture once I got a message about dropped frames and the capture aborted. At first glance the capture file seemed fine, but looking more closely I realized the video and audio were out of sync.

What kind of computer and what version of the system software are you using? FCP 3 is getting really old and FCP 4 was a huge improvement in terms of responsiveness. If you're using old system software then things may work OK, but I think you will have a variety of issues trying to use it with newer versions of MacOS X and Quicktime. FCP 3 is not an OSX native application... I used to run it on OS9. When I tried it under OSX (which was an early version) I had some problems, but we're going back a number of years here.

Also, what kind of hard drive are you capturing to? If it's the system boot drive then it may be fragmented and not performing as well as it used to. Same thing goes for an external drive if it has a lot of small files on it.

For starters you might try capturing to a freshly formatted external firewire drive and see if it helps. Also, if the drive is slower than 7200 RPM you will probably have some issues. Older firewire drives also had problems related to the speed of their firewire interface chipsets.