FCP Dropped frames warning

when i play back my timeline i get a dropped frame warning in red that tells me i need to increase my disc speed or decrease my RT layers. i am working on a G5 dual 2.5 with 4 gigs of ram and over 600 gigs of space. The project is less than 2 minutes long and freezes up my computer when i try to export it to a quicktime movie. does anyone know why this is happening? i have done a clean install of FCP in hopes of fixing this problem but so far nothing has changed.

I get a similar problem.
If I play the timeline no problems, will play the whole programme, but if I pause midway, then play again I inveriably get the dropped frame message almost immediatly. Can happen anywhere in the timeline !!!!
Only using dv and one or two layers !!!
Quad G5, latest FCP and Quicktime, bags of internal drive space, media on external fw 800 g raid, only quarter full.
Very frustrating.
Any thoughts?
Thanks

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Dropped Frames Warning after matching clip settings using Animation codec.

I have a 720 x 540 px animation exported as a QT movie from a 3D program, using the animation codec. I'm bringing it into Final Cut 6, placing it on the timeline and allowing FC to change its sequence settings to match those of the clip so it won't need to be rendered.
If I duplicate the clip several times, placing the duplicates back to back, the sequence plays w/ no problem. If I introduce a different clip, a generated slug or even leave a gap on the timeline I get the Dropped Frames Warning on the very last frame of the clip, right before the play head would move to the first frame of the new clip, or the slug, or the gap where there's nothing on the timeline.
If I initially bring in a clip that's been compressed using PNG and have Final Cut change its sequence settings to match those of the clip, everything plays flawlessly. Same thing using None compression. Plays fine. If I leave FC at its default settings and render the clips after I place them on the timeline, they play fine and I don't get the warning. I only get the warning when I have FC match the settings of a clip using the Animation codec.
I'm running 10.6.8 on a Mac Pro 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon w/ 16 GB Ram. My boot drive is an SSD and my video media is stored on a 2nd internal 7200 RPM HD.
I did read on another forum that the Animation codec tends not to perform so well in FC. I'm wondering if that's the problem or if it's hardware related?

Turn the warning off:
Go to the menu Final Cut Pro > User Preferences and on the General Pane, uncheck the Report dropped frames during playback box. Then click OK.
The warning only alerts you that FCP can't call up and display the frames fast enough to play in real time, so it is dropping frames - during playback.
When you are done editing, you will export the finished file from FCP into the deliverable format you want, during that process every frame of your timeline will be added to the exported file.
And yes, playing back in Animation Codec is real heavy lifting for FCP.
MtD

Dropped frame warning - corrections

I'm a 70 year old novice. When I get the "dropped frame warning" it gives me some suggestions of things I should do to correct the problem. I don't know how to make these corrections:
1. Lower compression data rate
2. Lowering the preference for real-time audio track.
3. Increase the speed of the system and/or disk drives and/or network conn.
Is there some help out there?

New Discussions ResponsesThe new system for discussions asks that after you mark your question as Answered, you take the time to mark any posts that have aided you with the tag and the post that provided your answer with the tag. This not only gives points to the posters, but points anyone searching for answers to similar problems to the proper posts.
If we use the forums properly they will work well...
Patrick

Dropped frame warning after adding 3d video transition between 2 clips....

Hi all,
I have the MBP in signature and after making a very short sequence with 2 small clips (obtained by the same master clip, from/on my SSD, that is 640x480 / 10fps with AppleOPEN DML codec) between which I insert a 3D video transition (cross zoom), if I press the space bar for preview (with unlimited RT setting + dynamic setting for playback and frame quality) I get the dropped frame warning as soon as the playhead reaches the 3D transition in the playtime....Is this normal even with my very new MBP specs???
Note that I am currently on battery and not on charger (--> the GT330M is gently underclocked).
May you please advise?
Thanks
Emanuele

Hey there,
First of all, FCE doesn't support your media. You should really use something like the free [MPEG Streamclip|http://www.squared5.com> to convert it to DV-NTSC with a frame size of 720x480, a frame rate of 29.97, and audio set to Uncompressed Stereo 48kHz. Edit the media in a DV-NTSC sequence within FCE.
After applying almost any effect you'll need to render it out to view it in real time. The shortcut is Option-R.

FinalCut Express, "dropped frames warning" How do I turn off unlimited RT?

FinalCut Express, "dropped frames warning" How do I turn off unlimited RT?

Click on the RT button at the top left of the timeline and select your playback preferences.

Drop Frame warning

I keep getting the Drop Frame warning while working in the timeline. I have my second internal drive as my capture scratch disc. RT is set to Safe RT, not Unlimited RT.
Any thoughts why this keeps happening??
Jamie

Hit ⌘-0. Look at the bottom of the window, to the place where there's a pop-up labeled "compressor."
(Yes, Apple uses "compressor" both to refer to the encoding of a timeline and the transcoding program. If you think that's bad, try Googling for help about Motion or Color. Thanks, Apple.)

Drop Frame/Non-Drop Frame Warning

Hi,
First off, thank you to the experienced people out there who take the time to explain things and answer these questions.
About the following warning:
Warning: You are about to capture drop-frame media to a non-drop frame clip. If you proceed, you may experience changes in logged in and out points, problems relinking media, or removal of master clip relationships.
I logged about 40 clips by entering In and Out points (from a piece of paper), turned on my camera, went to Batch Capture, and it gave me this warning. I read a little bit about timecode (I know little about it) and realized that I didn't use semi-colons when entering my timecode in the Log and Capture window. Apparently this is important; I have a Panasonic GS500.
I captured anyway, and I have all the video I want; the "handles" inherent in the In and Out points I used should accomodate even several seconds of any timecode discrepancy.
My question: When I am done editing and go to recapture my sequences at full DV quality, will there be a difference between the In and Out points of my clips and the tape? Have I mis-captured media files in some way? How can I tell if the Media Start and Media End information isn't out of sync?
Cyrus

Just check your timecode accuracy before you get any further... i.e. does the timecode in the captured clip match the code that's on the tape. If so, you're good to go on... if not, I'd recapture using the proper TC... it's pretty easy if you do it from the tape in the Log and Capture window.
Jerry

FCP Dropped Frames Freeze Up

Gurus, I've had a bad day, and I need your collective wisdom. FCP 7.0 S2 is up on two machines -- the 3-yr-old MacBook Pro and the brand new Mac Pro 8-core. I have a five-minute inspirational video to show in church today with a lovely 6K lumen DLP projector onto a 12-ft screen. It is great! I generated the timeline on the Mac Pro with an external G-Tech 800FW HD. Smooth as cake. And then I took the HD with this timeline to the MacBook Pro and took it on the road to the church with the brand new Matrox MX02 Mini box generating HDMI. In three showings: the system ceased to to a dropped frame stop everytime. Argggghh! Now I get that the MacPro octo 8-core whiz-bang water-cooled home machine is bigger, but the MacBook Pro is not underpowered -- 2.33GHz C2D Intel with nothing else running but the FCP timeline. It's a 2 track video/6 track audio simpleton timeline. What did I do wrong here? What's harder/more reliable than running the FCP timeline in real time?

I can't do your work for you. I do a great deal of research and testing on any job that involves a new workflow, format, whatever.
However,
Try this. Export a selfcontained qt with sequence settings. Create a NEW project in fcp, and import this selfcontained qt. This will probably play just fine. When you are playing your timeline of an edit out of fcp, fcp has to access media from all over the place and perhaps even attempt real time rendering. Exporting a selfcontained qt and playing it may solve your problem.

FCP Dropped Frames

I know this has been posted many times, but I can't seem to fix the problem. I have my video that I shot with my Canon T2i, which was transcoded to Apple ProRes 422 (LT). I've used Final Cut many times using those settings and the T2i... I first thought my 2nd internal hard drive was failing (where the media is stored), but then I plugged my G-Drive which connects through FireWire 800 (and which I've used before) and launched a project I finished and I still had the dropped frames problem... I trashed FCP preferences... I seem to get the dropped frames less if I restart the mac, but after 10 minutes the problem starts to reoccur... If anyone knows what else I can try?
Thanks,
Zevie

Make sure you have a minimum of 10% free space on all drives and considerably more on your startup drive.
Here are a list of troubleshooting tips that may help
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2591
In particular, I'd run diskutility: repair disk on all drives and get and run diskwarrior on all drives.
Try disconnecting all peripherals besides keyboard and mouse and one media drive and also turn off airport and disconnect ethernet.
Also, try creating a new user in system preferences: accounts.

Dropped Frame WARNING! RT Extreme Issue PLEASE HELP!

I've recently switched from PC to Mac and bought a MBP 2.5 and upgraded from 2gb RAM to 4gb.
For the last week I've been trying to learn the program with the FCE book from Apple and have been uploading footage from the enclosed CD and adding transitions and filters without a glitch.
But last night as I tried to open a new lesson and play it back I got this pop-up message.
One or more frames were dropped during playback
-Turning off "Unlimited RT"
-Lowering your compression data rate.
-Closing open sequences.
-Lowering the preference for real-time audio tracks.
-increasing the speed of your system and/or disk drives and/or network connection.
(in red) RT Extreme has determined these dropped frames were caused by slow disks. Please try:
-Increasing the speed of your disks.
-Decreasing the number of RT layers.
-Limiting your RT bandwidth in User Preferences.
Again I am very new to Mac, and I have no idea how to adjust all these setting or find any folder that I can erase or adjust the speed. I've searched all over the discussion board and can't find a clear answer for this. The Mac I bought is brand new from the Apple store and I thought it would be suffice for running FCE especially with the RAM upgrade so I think there's just something I need to tweak either in the System menu or the HD settings. Any suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated, also if any of you know any good book you can recommend for FCE I am all ears.
Thank you in advance.
Daniel

This is all about the preview and playback experience whilst editing and does not limit the quality of anything on a final render.
Final Cut takes rendered video segments and applies certain things dynamically and does stuff like overlaying audio tracks (and adjusting all of their volumes) on the fly whilst you are previewing.
Give Final Cut more work to do and you will eventually hit some resource constraint on your system. You can either ignore this message or set some limitations on the quality that you expect during preview of this kind so that you get a smooth experience or you can turn off the warning and get noticable performance degradation.
You need to decide if you can afford stutter etc. whilst performing an edit session or if you can sacrifice some video or audio quality (that will return on export) or if you need beefier hardware. Its just a matter of choice but I agree the warning looks nasty.
-Andy

Dropped Frames warning window...

In the middle of playing back what I was working on, I suddenly got an error messege that said, "Warning: Dropped Frames." It then gave me a list of options to decrease the chance of it happening again, which included turning off "Unlimited RT."
What's Unlimited RT? My computer is brand new and it was my first session using Final Cut Express. Sorry I'm a newbie, thanks for the help!

When that option is on, the computer will display as much of the content as it can. Click here for more information.
(28380)

Dropped frames warning on new Macbook Pro

I've been running FCP faultlessly for the last year or so on a Macbook Pro 15". I recently bought a Macbook Pro 17" with the I5 quad core processor and for the first time I'm getting dropped frame error messages here and there. This is the last thing I would have expected on my all singing and dancing new Macbook Pro!
I've set up FCP, as far as I can see, exactly the same as my other Macbook and I've updated FCP to 7.03. Is there something more that I should have done?

I couldn't be assed going through the detail, because it would have been irrelevant wouldn't it? The old Macbook Pro was working perfectly with the same hard discs and the New Macbook Pro Quad Core wasn't,so the answer was going to be inside the new machine rather than any external device. That was where I was looking for help, on an internal Mac setting., I don't need to be lectured on the speed/size/performance of discs etc as I've running stuff for 2 years with no problems at all on the old machine.Sorry to have been so abrupt, but having just spent £2000 on my new Macbook Pro and then finding these errors appearing, as you can imagine I wasn't in the best of moods!
Anyway, I solved the problem with the help of an old post from Tom Wolsky, where he suggests "Trashing the preferences" as sometimes an element within this can become corrupted and cause strange problems.This free utility in effect resets the Mac.

Why do my FCP drop frames on playback working on HD movies?

Working on HD movies may machine drop frames after I cut the secuense. Why?
Model Name:          Mac Pro       OS X    V. 10.6.8
Model Identifier:          MacPro5,1
Processor Name:          Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed:          2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors:          2
Total Number Of Cores:          8
L2 Cache (per core):          256 KB
L3 Cache (per processor):          12 MB
Memory:          14 GB
ATI Radeon HD 5770:
Chipset Model:          ATI Radeon HD 5770
Type:          GPU
Bus:          PCIe
Slot:          Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width:          x16
VRAM (Total):          1024 MB

lots of numbers.
what's missing:
How's your Events drive connected, internal or external? if ext, usb2/3/fw/tb?
Are you using Optimized media? Proxies? if not, what codec?
Finally: complexity of Project - multicam, color correction, multiple tracks?

FCP Dropped Frames on HD Capture - No Warnings

Hi,
I've been having a devil of a time capturing HD video on my Mac Pro (specs below).
I'm capturing about 45 minutes of video from a MiniDV HD camcorder (Sony HDR-HC5). Not sure what camera shot the footage. It seems that every time I capture, FCP creates more than one file, and in every case there is a gap of missing frames between the files. The shot is continuous (no tape stopping) for that entire length of time, which is why I expect to see only one file. There is no file size limit on the capture, and the time limit for capture is 64 minutes - well exceeding the footage duration.
Each time I try the capture the breaks happen at different times in the footage. Sometimes near the start (within a few minutes) and in other cases after 27 or more minutes. The breaks later in the capture seem to be short bursts of 1 minute or less then the capture settles down and goes continuous.
I'm thinking a process or bus thing that happens at some interval, but I've shut down all applications except FCP after a fresh boot. I also unmounted and disconnected all external drives on the Firewire ports. The USB drives are unmounted but not disconnected. I've also disabled Time Machine.
My capture drive is an internal SATA drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (no journaling) and was freshly wiped, formatted and restored - so all space should be contiguous.
Any ideas welcome. I can recapture over the gaps and piece the footage together - but I shouldn't have to. This should work.
Specs and tech details:
Machine: Mac Pro (2x2.8 GHz Quad Core Xeon), 10GB RAM, 360GB AND 100GB internal SATA
Mac OS X 10.5.7
Capture volume: Internal secondary SATA freshly formatted
Capture Setting/Easy Setup: Apple Intermediate Codec, 1080i60 (failed also with the 1080i60 HDV setup)
I've tried the capture with iMovie '09 with the same split file result. I've had one tape capture in tack, but have not been able to duplicate that experience.
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks,
Sean

I'm finding that although random, I think the issue is the camera or tapes, though I'm not sure why.
Watching the video on capture, I see the video on the camera monitor pause though I hear the tape continue and then it seems to catch up. At that stage FCP create a new file. I've inspected the tape at these places and it seems fine. It also seems to play fine again once I reinsert the tape. It may or may not pause again later in the playback. I've seen this pause with and without capture happening.
Now I'm looking for ideas on how these tapes might exhibit this issue. Is this my camera (which is very new) or a tape issue (but 3/4 tapes seems a high percentage). Anyone with experience with this or anything I can check to provide more data to debug?
Thanks,
Sean

FCP Capture Dropped frames with advanced pulldown

Ok so here's my problem, I have Final Cut studio with FCP 4.5 and I'm trying to import 24p advanced pulldown media from my tapes, and getting a dropped frames warning that ends import; but after trying both cameras (the one the footage was shot with and a second one) and different tapes with normal footage and 24P advanced I still get the same error message. Then I went and replaced the firewire cable with no luck, and I just went and got a PCI firewire card qualified for video import same dropped frames.
Now before I put in the PCI card I clean installed FCP studio with no luck, I also went through and triple checked every setting in FCP for any problems; and I'm wondering if it might mean that either, I need to replace the media drive I'm importing to or if I need more then my 1GB of RAM?

I too am having the exact same problem with 4.5 (although no advanced pull down) and 24p. Last week I was importing fine, this week, dropped frames right and left using batch capture after logging my clips.
I'm using a dual 2.0ghz G5 with 3.5gb of RAM, 10.4.9, booting off a 250gb internal (48gb free) disk but using a G-Tech 500gb firewire 800 external firewire drive for scratch(400gb free). Media is miniDV, tape deck is Sony GVD1000 and I've tried my DVX100b for playback as a test. I've gone thru the FCP checklist and used Disk Utility and Disk Warrior (no problems there). I've tried different tapes (including ones that were successfully captured last week).
I'm suspecting that some recent download of QTime, OSX, or iTunes is at fault. Anyone else suspect the same?

FCP Dropped frames warning

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