Audio Problems - One Channel Slow and Sometimes Not At All

Question

Hello,
I'm having a terrible problem, since yesterday - but not in the weeks before. The audio tracks are acting very strange. Sometimes one channel plays normal while the other plays at a reduced speed. Sometimes no audio comes out at all. And when this problem starts happening I continually get the 'Warning - Dropped Frames' box every few seconds.
Strange thing is that last night I was having this problem, and although repairing permissions, and trashing preferences didn't seem to have an effect, after moving all the media to a single location it seemed to be working fine. So, somehow, everything was working great last night when I finished working.
I come in this morning, open the same project that was fine upon closing down last night, hit play and one channel's slow, then it doesn't sound at all, then I don't even get sound in the viewer when I open clips there. And now it's constantly stopping with a 'Warning - Dropped Frames' box.
The system is new as of a month ago, everything was working fine on the first project I did.
The Sequence settings and media settings are all correct - that doesn't seem to be the problem. And There was no problem working on the last project with all the media coming off the 500GB internal hard drive, so I can't imagine I'd need to get an external just for it to work.
My intuition thinks it may have something to do with some of the video clips using time remapping, but the main audio that's causing the problem is a music track, not associated with any of the video (so it shouldn't be linked in any way).
I'm using Final Cut Studio 2, with full updates, etc. on a 24" iMac 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB RAM, 500 GB internal hard drive (100GB still available), running OS X 10.4.10.
Please help,
the system is basically useless until this is fixed,
Thanks,
Matt Morreale
www.yogamayafilms.com

Answer 1

Matt,
I just read your post... I am having the same issue. You have explained the issue better than I did in my post. You can read my comments under the subject Final Cut Pro 6 Drop Frame Issue... As you will read, my issue started last weekend when I upgraded to Leopard. Yesterday, I spoke with Apple Tech (Final Cut Pro Support)... They had me do a clean install of Leopard and re-install final cut studio. Once that was complete, do the software upate. Problem still existed. I then called them back and they had me do a clean install of the origianal OS software from the disk that came with my Mac Pro. I than re-installed Final Cut Studio and did the software updates... I still have the same issue.. And like your post stated, I can be in a project and the sound is perfect and then hit the play bar again and the sound is either distorted or it is like an echo where the track is playing and sounds like a second track is right behind it. (Almost like listening to a radio talk show and the person has the radio on and you can hear the time delay of their conversation.
The Apple support team told me to go into the user preference inside final cut and uncheck the following boxes...
Report dropped frames during palayback
abort ett/ptv on dropped frames
abort capture on dropped frames
They said by removing the checks on the three items above, I would stop receiving the Dropped Frame Error Message (until i unchecked the boxes), I would get the error message every 29 frames when trying to play the clip in the timeline. However, by remiving the checks, I still have the issue with the audio...
Question, Have you updated your software, and if so is that when the problems started occurring?
I agree with your comment "the system is basically useless until this is fixed", Please keep me posted,
Thanks
jbk