Final Cut Pro Problem

[DJPoLo]

Something has changed in my FCP app. Lately, when I play clips in the Viewer window, the video image will play fine for a second or two and then freeze while the audio continues on. All footage plays fine in the Canvas window.

This is on a 133 GHz PowerBook G4 17" with 1.5 GB RAM running OSX 10.3.9.

EDIT: Ok, I just noticed in this project that some of the video clips play fine in the Viewer. Those clips have a data rate of 3.6 MB/sec. while the problem clips have a higher data rate at 6.9 MB/sec..

Any ideas? George?

-Chet

Edited December 9, 2005 by DJPoLo

[mcoliver]

Not sure if this will help but everytime I get weird probs in video that I didn't get before, I just defrag the hard drive. HTH.

[BritinUSA]

Are the clips stored in a folder that has FileVault enabled ? Cos that will cause delays in getting the data.

[diehli]

Makes me wonder if the vid card can handle that kinda data flow.

[George]

The PowerBook only has a 5400 RPM HD and isn't really fast enough to do this kinda work without some issues. In FCP's System Settings menu playback tab make sure the RT setting is on Safe and that you set video playback quality to medium or low. If it still does it after these settings are made (or if they are set that way already), then stop using 6.9MBS clips ;-)

BTW, never defrag an OSX startup drive like in the PowerBook. OS X hates having itself moved around and it will punish you for it eventually.

Try booting to a Panther install CD and running Disk Utility on the startup drive to see if the volume structure is intact. If you don't have the install CD, running fsck -yf in single user mode will verify and repair the volume structure. A permission repair never hurts either.

Another thought, have you run your cron scripts lately? If not, they can cause a system to get really sluggy. Cocktail for OSX is a 3rd party utility that allows this to be done on command. If the machine isn't left on and not asleep all night, every night, these scripts don't run and they need to run or the machine will get wonky.

Let me know what works out here.

--

Regards,

[DJPoLo]

Thanks for all the tips, guys. I'm at my day job now so I can't try these out 'till I get home tonight.

...then stop using 6.9MBS clips ;-)

The odd thing is, I imported all the clips myself from MiniDV tape about nine months ago. How I changed the data rate on some of them but not others is beyond me.

Oh, and lastly, the clips are all stored on external FireWire (IEEE 1394) drives.

-Chet

Edited December 9, 2005 by DJPoLo

[XRe]

BTW, never defrag an OSX startup drive like in the PowerBook. OS X hates having itself moved around and it will punish you for it eventually.

Gee.. that's "smart"... I don't know a whole lot about Mach derived filesystems, but... in general, Unix-ey filesystems don't actually *need* to be defragged, unless you fill the filesystem. Otherwise, they strive to co-locate a file's blocks in one spot or close to it, anyway... There's definitely something to be said for having a separate FS (and partition) for special purpose stuff - like video or audio - as you can set the filesystem block size differently, and you don't end up with little files interspersed....

It's those FAT based filesystems you really have to look out for.... NTFS doesn't appear to be too horrible about it....

[George]

I love NTFS compared to FAT (there is nothing phat about FAT).

S'Truth about keeping "Nix" filesystems from getting too full. Never let your OS X startup drive get below 20% free space or X will start to get a little uncomfortable ;-)

The Mac version of the NTFS filesystem is exactly the same as any other. The problem with partitioning a HD in a PowerBook and doing video work from the second partition is that the drive gets even slower when it's timesharing the head. Better to do video on a tower and just use separate internal drives altogether.