Drop Frames!! Ahh!

[Barry Longfellow]

Okay, not panicking just yet. But I'm having some issues with Final Cut dropping frames on Red footage.

By way of background, we did a set of commercials for a college one year ago. Shot on Red 4K, edited with proxies. Absolutely no problems with playback.

One year later, the college calls back, greenlights new spots. However, with budgets dramatically smaller, they wish to use footage from last year to mix with the new spot.

I pull up the project from last year and start assembling the edit. However, the proxies drop frames EVERY time. Sequence set to Unlimited RT like before. Everything should playback fine, but it won't. A few seconds of real time, then stuttering, then stop with the drop frame warning.. Ugh.

What could have changed since then that causes this to happen? Has anyone run into this problem or know of a related thread? Perhaps a simple switch I may have bumped?


Here's our specs (which have not changed since the original spots).

Quad-core Mac Pro 3 GHz
10 GB RAM
BlackMagic DeckLink HD Extreme


Thank you in advance for your thoughts!!

Barry

 

[Noah Kadner]

It's not unheard of to drop frames on proxies- it's a ton of processing your asking FCP to do and since it's just for editorial- not a big deal. Turn off the dropped frame warning and gear down to Unlimited RT with Dynamic Frame Rate. If that doesn't fix it, cut with smaller proxies or transcode to ProRes or get faster hard drives.

Noah

 

[Greg Huson]

I don't need to tell you, but FCP is very fickle (sp?). Things to check ate as simple as your easy setup. How full is your storage? That effects
playback speed. Have you changed the os or the qt version? If so, you need the latest drivers for BMD, maybe other parts of the system. Cutting with proxies is a bit of a hat trick to begin with - are you seeing this with new
projects?

 

[Barry Longfellow]

Easy setup has always been DV/DVCPRO SD. We work with a variety of formats from ProRes to Uncompressed, so I never really touch it. My boot drive has 43GB left and the project drive has about 300GB out 500 left.

I simply don't understand why it worked flawlessly one year ago and now it's buggy.

I will see if I can find any new drivers for BlackMagic. Perhaps that will solve it.

And yes, we just saw this problem on a different project. Had to resort to ProRes for the edit, because the system freaked out with the QT proxies.

Thanks for your input so far. Any other thoughts?

 

[Cail Young]

I simply don't understand why it worked flawlessly one year ago and now it's buggy.

Did you update to Leopard in that time? Broke it for us all around.

Solution is to bite the bullet and turn the warning off - or transcode.