External Drive Dropping Frames

Hey,
I am in a Post Production class at GSU and I am having some tech problems here. I am running Final Cut Pro 5 on a Mac G5. We are required to have External HDD, but everytime I play a sequence I keep dropping frames. My HDD is a 160 GB, 7200 RPM, Western Digital in an Adaptec enclosure connecting via FireWire. Any ideas?

Search here for dropped frames.
There are dozens of possible explanations. the most likely is user error and that can be caused by dozens of simple things. You start with the simple things and try to eliminate one at a time. Cable, card, system prefs, FCP setup, FCP prefs, FW pathway. It's all in the manual, what you can and should not do.
Your post production class instructor should be able to help you much more rapidly than we possibly can.
bogiesan

Similar Messages

External Drive = Dropped Frames in Playback

Hi there Al--
Here's the gear I have...and the problem I'm NOW having.
Gear:
PowerBook G4 with OS X 10.3.9 and 45GB disk space
768 RAM
LaCie D2 160GB Harddrive
Panasonic MiniDV cam and Sony PD 150
Final Cut Express HD
Problem: I can capture to my internal HD fine, and playback sequences on projects located on my internal HD fine. BUT I cannot capture to my external Lacie drive using either the Panasonic MiniDV cam or Sony PD 150 cam. That's not such a big deal, as I can capture to the internal hard drive and transfer the captured footage to the lacie external drive--however Final Cut won't let me do anything from the external HD. Whenever I try to view footage on a project from the external drive I get a "dropped frame" message from Final Cut (I can't even just play an individual quicktime file from the external drive). I'm a bit baffled...as the lacie drive i'm told is the "pro" drive for editing with final cut.
Thoughts?

That's great news !
Regarding the format - I'll admit that I stand by Will Rodgers' advice (If it ain't broke, don't fix it) ... if things are working fine now you probably don't have to worry about the format ... but you might want to check it just to know what it is (I suspect it's Mac OS Extended, anyway)
cheers !

MAC PRO KONA 3 External SATA dropped frames

Recently our company upgraded to KONA3 card with the new MAC PRO. We were not aware our External SATA drives would not be 100% compaditable with the MAC PRO. The drives do mount and seem to work fine in Standard Def and compressed HD, but start to drop frames when dealing with Uncompress capturing. Spoke with AJA and was referred to use Fibre or SCSI based on the LH FAQ portion of their site.
We've installed a temp Fibre Channel Drives and set the card on port 4, with the KONA3 card on Port 3. Do note the drives are RAID 0.
Still having dropped frames when capturing Uncompress HD to the drives.
My questions are:
1) Why does the MAC PRO not support External SATA?
2) Any ideas to contribute to my Fibre issues?
3) What type of other storage solution has been proven to work?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank You All For Your Professional Experience
Marcus
MAC PRO 2.66 Dual Core Intel
2GB of RAM
3.2 TB of EXTERNAL SATA (from Promax)
500GB FIBRE CHANNLE
OS 10.4.8
KONA 3 Drivers vs3.3
FCP 5.1.2
MAC PRO Mac OS X (10.4.8) KONA3; External SATA

My questions are:
1) Why does the MAC PRO not support External SATA?
The only Mac Pro compatible External SATA drive is from CalDigit. This has been proved by people in Barefeats and Creativecow. More and more people are using CalDigit S2VR HD and their FASTA-4e card to do the editing.
3) What type of other storage solution has been proven to work?
S2VR HD has been provedn to work and work very well with great price. Many people are raving about CalDigit's products and its support.
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862284
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862289
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862301
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=8&postid=917131
Power G5 Quad and Intel Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.3)

External Drives dropped by OSX

For some time now, external drives that are attached and recognized on the desktop will be randomly dropped, needing to turn the drive off and back on again to be re-recognized. Sometimes this could be my drive for Time Machine, other times a different drive, but a third drive seems to never be "lost". Strange behavior, and not a "killer" but a "nuisance." Anyone else notice this?

Getting back to this thread...
I removed Time Machine's Backups.backupdb from this troublesome 500GB USB drive. (I saved it as a disk image on a new 1TB USB drive.)
After attempting a dozen or more fruitless Disk Repairs, I am sure the problem with the drive not connecting is related to a corruption of the drive's Backups.backupdb. Disk repair kept saying it could not fix missing symlinks and a corrupt catalog file. Moreover, after reformatting the 500GB USB drive, it has not disconnected as before.
Given that many many posts on this thread involve Time Machine, I would venture to say this USB connectivity issue has to do with software (Time Machine) and not hardware. In fact, I have problems mounting the disk image and need to kill fdsk in Activity Monitor in order to get it to mount as a Read Only disk. I am told Disk Warrior may be able to fix the corrupted file but I'm not spending the money as it is not certain to work.
Currently I have resumed using Time Machine on the new 1TB drive. I was hoping to merge the old 500BG Time Machine file that went back to May 15, 2008 but so far the corruption issue has prevent the usual methods to migrate/restore Time Machine to a new drive from an old one. At this time, I am able to access the old 500BG Time Machine file and view it through Time Machine. A kludgy fix but it works.
~Frank

Capture Direct to External HD/Dropped frames with Firewire-In and eSATA-Out

I have been working on a setup with a brand new 2.6 GHz MBP/4 GB/200 GB-7200rpm HD. I am capturing DVCAM via Firewire400. I am capturing direct to a LaCie Biggest Quadra connected to an eSATA PCI card. I keep encountering dropped frames on capture. Could this be due to the PCI connection? To the best of my knowledge, the PCI slot is a separate bus from the Firewire bus, which should avoid the pitfalls of i/o on the same Firewire bus. What could be the problem here? Thanks in advance.

If you have a MacBook Pro, then yes the ExpressCard bus is separate form the firewire bus. The pros here ALWAYS recommend capturing via firewire to a different bus, either firewire or eSATA via an ExpressCard (or PCI for the previous generation laptops) since the card is on a different bus. Have you tried attempting a capture to the inter drive? I know this is in no way ideal, but this way, we can rule out the camera/deck. DVCAM also isn't much bigger than DV if at all, so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. Again, not ideal, but try connecting the big disk to the other firewire port on your MBP. This way we can rule out the eSATA card. Report back and we'll see what else we can do to help.
Don't forget to rate if this was helpful,
-Brian

OK, Dropped frames due to firewire+external hard drive+camcorder?

I have an iMac 2.4GHz , 1G Memory (I know this is less than ideal). I have a Firelite Smartdisk 120G plugged into iMac firewire. I am daisychaining my CanonZR500 into the external drive. When I capture video I have lots of dropped frames.
Anyone tell me why? Do I need a better external drive?
Thanks

Not all Canon cameras have connection issues, but hanging around this site I've come to recognize their ability to connect in FCP is the most problematic of all the camera brands. If you have a Canon camcorder, and can not get it to connect up with FCP, the following is a way to sort through the issues and get it to work. Some are elegant - some are ugly.
Before we go any farther -
• You should be using 'Firewire Basic' as the control protocol. If you aren't, go change it and try again.
• Also, verify that you have a solid installation of Quicktime. You may want to reinstall it using the 'delete receipts' method. Do a quick search here on the site - it is mentioned daily if not hourly.
With some confidence that the software installation and camera settings are correct ... the most direct solution is to purchase another, non-Canon device to use as your capturing machine. The Sony DSR-11 is highly recommended for DV work. A deck will save wear and tear on the camera's lightweight drive mechanism and will allow you to permanently connect a NTSC/PAL monitor for proper viewing. If you are working with HDV, you may have other issues ...
Beyond that, the path you take depends on the model of computer you own.
1. If you have a G5 tower or a MacPro, capture to a second internal drive with only the camera attached. If you need to move material to firewire drive, disconnect the camera. A second internal drive is quite inexpensive these days if you do not already have one.
2. If you have a G5 tower (PCI) MacPro (PCIe), G4 powerbook (PCMCIA) or MacBookPro (Expresscard 34) with an available slot, purchase the appropriate firewire card for the slot. Connect your camera to the card and you should be good to go. The new card creates a unique bus and will avoid collisions with the external drives.
3. If you do not have a slot or a second internal drive and you are stuck with the camera, welcome to the camera/drive shuffle.
• shut down and remove the external hard drive(s) from the system
• connect the camera directly to the firewire port of the computer
• start the camera then the computer
• capture to your internal (system) hard drive
• shut down the camera and computer
• disconnect the camera and reconnect the external hard drive(s)
• start hard drive(s) and computer
• move captured files to external hard drive(s)
• edit
If you output back to tape or wish to view your work on an external Video (NTSC or PAL) monitor, you need to set up the camera to use the firewire out as the A/DV converter or VTR - which means reversing the steps:
• copy the file back to the internal drive
• shut everything down
• disconnect the external drive(s)
• connect the camera to the firewire port (and the TV to the camera if needed)
• start the camera then the computer
• play the file.
One caveat here - You may have difficulty getting the file back to tape without dropping frames. Playing files off of the system drive is very demanding and they may have a hard time keeping up.
All in all, if you do not have the option for second bus (i.e. iMacs, eMacs, iBooks, MacBooks) you may want to think about a computer with expandable options next time.
There is the option of capturing using iMovie, but that brings on it's own set of problems and is not recommended.
Good luck.
x

"Dropped Frames" error when capturing to Drobo external drive

Hi, I am looking to buy another external hard drive for video editing with Final Cut (as my scratch disk). I had purchased a Drobo because of the data redundancy and ease of use, but it's definitely NOT an editing drive - way too slow, I can't even capture video to it without getting "dropped frames" errors (even w/Firewire 800). And after searching these forums, I've read that others have experienced the same problems and that in the end it turns out that the Drobo is not an editing drive. Jeez, that was an expensive learning experience.
Soooooo I'm not very knowledgeable on hard drives, RAID, etc... but I would like to buy something that has redundancy (would that be RAID??) but is absolutely HAS to be something I can capture video and edit on. I know some people have bought 2 drives, one for editing and one for backup, but I know I'd forget to back it up every time and it seems like a bit of a hassle. Just thinking there's got to be an easier way that's hopefully not too expensive.
Are there any editors here who can point me to specific hard drive models or tell me exactly what I need to look for in a drive? I believe OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/) probably has what I need, I just don't know what it is I need to get since I'm hard drive ********. Any advise would be appreciated!

Thank you Shane. Wow, didn't realize how expensive that would be. Not an option for me at the moment then.
That said, is there another hard drive (non-RAID) that is good for editing? For instance, could I use a Western Digital MyBook (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000VZCEU8/ref=ordcartshr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance) to do my editing and then have another one for backup? Sorry for all the questions, I just want to make sure I understand and get this right!
Thanks

Dropping frames capturing to external hard drive

When I attempt to capture video from my Powerbook G4 using my Lacie External drive as my Scratch Disk, I get the 'dropped frames' error message. However, when I capture through my IMac Desktop G5 onto the very same Lacie External drive I have no problems. Both the Powerbook G4 and the IMac Desktop G5 have about 20G of free space on each of their 80G Hard Drives. Any suggestions? Many Thanks!

There is a good chance that your problem is caused by
using the HD in USB 2 mode.
Most people consider USB 2 is unsuitable for video
editing.
DV needs a drive capable of a consistent high speed
that can only be provided by FW.
Although the claimed speeds of USB 2 appear to be as
high, they are not because they are the MAXIMUM
speeds achieved and are not sustained. In the real
world USB 2 is barely half the speed of FW.
When using your PowerBook you could try
daisy-chaining your camera to the HD to the computer
- by FW of course.
Ian.
Thanks! Great Advice!

Unable to capture files into external hard disk because of 'drop frames '

I haven't been able to capture footage from my DV camcoder thru firewire to an external hard disk in FCP because i get a message saying 'drop frames were detected'.
This happens when i selected this external hard drive as the scratch disk in FCP.
When i deslect it and select my user hard disk as the scratch disk, the capturing works perfectly. But i just want to capture all my capture files into the external hard disk, not my user hard disk.
The external hard disk's speed is 3500 - could that be the problem? Is it too slow? Its connected thru USB and it is Mac Os Extended Journaled. Its got 250gb of space, so that's not the issue.
Can anybody help me?
Thank you.

No, its a Panasonic gs180, a really good camera.
The camera itself is connected to my computer through firewire. Its the hard disk enclosure that is connected to my emac through USB. Anyway, i'm sure that's not the problem, casue like i said, the capturing works fine when i use my user hard disk as the FCP scratch disk.
The problem i have is when i try to capture footage from my camera to the external hard disk enclosure. When i press 'capture now' and press play, the playback stutters and a messsage appears saying, "drop frames detected" and the capturing stops.
I feel like i need to adjust something in FCP itself - like a preference or something - just not sure what.
Thnx for your suggestion though and if you know what i should do, please let me know.

When i am logging/ Capturing my mac is telling me that i am getting dropped frames. would i need to get a LaCie Hard Drive?

When i am logging/ Capturing my mac is telling me that i am getting dropped frames. would i need to get a LaCie Hard Drive?

To be honest, I've had 2 Lacie drives crash out of 2 bought. That's not a good track record for me.
Your best bet (I'm a computer professional, for what it's worth):
Get a hard drive case or enclosure that supports firewire 800 and put your own PC hard drive (SATA for example) 7200rpm or higher hard drive into it.
Let me explain a bit more. External hard drive manufacturers often put no-name hard drives into fancy cases to cut costs and that's how they make a profit. I've have had nothing but problems with with these types of drives. (Like Lacie) You are much better off getting some type of decent drive enclosure and getting your own GOOD hard drive. I would highly recommend Seagate, I have NEVER had a problem with a Seagate drive in 20 years of owning PCs and Macs. Western Digital is also a good brand (though I had 1 crash). These are the types of drives you would put in your Mac Pro. You want to get an SATA hard drive.
I have owned several external cases where the case electronics fried, but the hard drives were still in good shape. Take the hard drive out, put it into a new case you're good to go!
For video you want to make sure that your hard drive case supports Firewire 800! This is mandatory.
My personal favorite, (and I own 5 of these) is Vantec's NexStar hard drive enclosure. They accept any SATA 3.5" drive (I bought mine from a company called ComputerStop). I have yet to have a single problem with any of them. They are solid aluminum casing, you can literally throw them into your backback, drop them on the floor and your hard drive is fairly well protected from impact damage (at least you won't break the case with anything short of a sledgehammer). I am currently looking at getting a second one of these:
http://www.vantecusa.com/gl/product/view_detail/173
(My bad, this is an IDE case up to 750GB)
This the one you want:
http://www.vantecusa.com/gl/product/view_detail/354
As far as the hard drive, you can get a Seagate Baracuda drive 1TB at 7200rpm drive for about $60. The case and hard drive together, maybe a few over $100 for the whole thing. With shipping, and tax figure about $150.
Don't let the price fool you. It will rock.
Story: I got an iOmega "raid" case with two Seagate drives in it and the iOemga case fried, but the hard drives were still good. Fortunately, they were in two removable trays. I put them into two "rocketfish" hard drive cases almost 3 years ago and I am still using them every day today.
Moral of this story: It's the quality of the hard drive that matters, not what case it's in.
Is it hard to set up?
Not at all. You put the hard drive into a tray, (with Vantec case), screw it in. It only goes in 1 way. Plug in a power cable to the drive. Slide the tray into the case (carefully, don't munch the power cable!) and screw it in place. You can literally do it in 10 minutes or less. There are, of course instructions, but if you are reasonably clever, you can literally see what plugs into what just by looking at it.
Sorry for the long reply, but I have a lot of experience with external drives and I hope this helps others.
Finally, when you make it to the big time you can spend $400, get yourself a firewire RAID enclosure and you can upgrade to 4 external hard drives in 1 enclosure. Figure $800 for that set up, but you can go up to 12 TB of drive space with that, or up to 3TB if you are running redundant discs. But that's a whole other ballgame...
Peace.

Multiclip Dropped Frames/Data Rates from from FW 800, 7200rpm Drive

I am using an external Lacie 7200 rpm "Little Big Disk" .. Editing DV Multiclips in Final Cut (3.6 MB/sec data rate per clip... 7 clips/streams) But it won't play back all at once, anything over 15 MB/sec data transfer rate (as I watch Activity Monitor) it starts choking and dropping frames til it just freezes. Lacie claims that this drive handles a steady 80MB/sec transfer rate... All I need to do all these streams is 26 MB/sec (That's the speed it does at work from an XSAN and no problem playing back 7 streams of DV) Is the bog down in my system the FW800, my RAM, processor, or the Cache of the drive? (16MB)

Do you have any other FireWire devices (incl. cameras) plugged into other ports on the computer or on the drive itself? There's only one FireWire bus on a G5, and it's shared between the FW800 port and the FW400 port on the back in addition to the FW400 port on the front.
If you have other devices plugged in, they can cause the entire bus to slow down to the speed of the slowest connected device.

I just purchased Time Capsule today. I ONLY want to use it as an external drive. I do not need it for Time Machine. I can see the TC in my finder, but when I click on a file or video to drag and drop, I get message that TC can't be modified. Help please

I just purchased Time Capsule today. I ONLY want to use it as an external drive. I do not need it for Time Machine. I need to free up room on my computer. As of now, I can't even load updates. I can see the TC in my finder, but when I click on a file or video to drag and drop, I get message that TC can't be modified. Help please!

I agree with Kappy.. passing files and especially via wireless is slow as slow.
Just need to be sure your TC is the new AC model??
And the OS on the computer is Lion?
Have you completed the setup of the TC via the utility? You do still need to get internet via the TC so it has to be plugged into the main router..
Give us the full picture of the network.
Then we can help you get into it.. whether you should put your files on it is another question.

HT2518 how do i or can i drag and drop files from one external drive to another ???HOW

how do i drag and drop files from one external drive to another, i cannt get both drives to open up. only one at a time.. i have alot to learn i know but that is where i am at the time...

You posted here so would assume you are also talking about running Windows.
Are the drives NTFS and use on Windows?
Are they Mac HFS formatted?
You likely will need NTFS for OS X in one case. to mount PC and use under Mac OS Lion
MacDrive to mount and WRITE to HFS drives under Windows

Hello.... I already loaded logic 9 on my laptop hard drive... I would to load all the samples and loops on an external drive... Do I need to reinstall from DVD's or can I drag and drop?

Hello.... I already loaded logic 9 on my laptop hard drive... I would to load all the samples and loops on an external drive... Do I need to reinstall from DVD's or can I drag and drop?

Thank you.... Would you know where they would be on my hard dive? Are they all together?

I have been backing up iMovie 08 files to my external drive, but for some reason I can't open these files in iMovie. I used drag and drop to copy them.

I have been backing up iMovie 08 files to my external drive, but for some reason I can't open these files in iMovie. I used drag and drop to copy them.

You really should be doing backups with an actual backup application, especially one that will work automatically, and, if your external HD is large enough, back up your entire system. These can automatically back up only what's changed since the previous backup, and some will keep "archive" copies of things you've changed or deleted, also.
Too many things can go wrong, such as your internal HD failing, and you'll have a major project to reinstall everything.
You already have Time Machine, built-in to OSX. You might want to review the Time Machine Tutorial, and perhaps browse Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.
#27 in the second link mentions some alternatives, too.

External Drive Dropping Frames

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