Print To Video HDV dropping out

Question

When I try to print to video from the computer to a Sony HDV 1080i deck it goes and conforms all the video then I start the process and it works fine until a certain spot and will go to black then back on again etc.
I've tried this a few times and at the same spot will get the problem so I checked to make sure it wasn't the tape, I threw away the rendered files and re-rendered them again. I even saved the project to a quicktime movie which played back looks fine. I tried to use the quicktime file and it stops at the same place everytime.
Any suggestions?
I even went and rendered all of my sequences, mixed down the audio etc.
thanks in advance!
Just recently went from FCP 5.1.2 to 5.1.4 I did another project last week and the print to video worked out fine I was wondering if this was a bug in 5.1.4?
Using FCP 5.1.4

Answer 1

conforming and decoding the mpeg2 HDV stream seems to be the hardest thing for the computer to do. Enough RAM, and a beefy video card will help. I think it's a miracle every time I can get a batch of HDV clips to sucessfully capture. Cutting doesn't go too bad, but I have found outputting native HDV to be nearly impossible.
We had about 3 hours worth of 10-15 minute segments to output, and it took close to 3 weeks of constant effort, outputting one sequence at a time. It would black out, stop playing back, freeze up, put all kind of breaks in the timecode even if you pre-stripe the tape. And all the while it would never, ever alert or abort on dropped frames, timcode breaks, etc.
One of the big problems was rendered material. I used a page peel transition (I know, I know, it was a video cookbook, gimme a break) in the HDV segments. I took the time to set up each one with an image for the "back" of the page from the context of the segment. Rendered playback from the timeline looked fine, but as soon as I went to tape, the background of each peel would display whatever image I had most recently applied - all of them - but only on output. I wound up having to replace the backgound of each one one at a time, export each transition as a self-contained movie, bring it back in as clips and re-sync it with the surrounding media. Luckily there were only about 150 of them to do. All this I started doing after the first solid week of failed output attempts. Even then, any rendered material in my sequences would trigger the dreaded dropouts, freeze frames, skips, and substituted rendered material. So after another couple days of attempts, I wound up exporting self-contained movies of every minute of my output, re-editing them back into sequences, and so finally I was able to output to tape in 10-minute chunks, and it only took 5 or 10 tries for each one. The only reason I really needed to go to tape in the first place was because I found impossible to transcode the HDV to SD mpeg for DVD without field artifacts, and abysmally unacceptible quality. So I recaptured the HDV as DV using the deck's downconvert, which seemed to be the only thing it could do well.
I believe that a faster computer with more RAM and a better video card would have made a big difference. Newer versions of FCP have probably solved a lot of the issues I had with the rendered material. Even so, there are aspects of the long-GOP, mpeg-2 stream aspects of HDV and the way that it negatively affects timecode, deck control, and capture and output, that make the format my last choice for professional editing.
For your situation, I'd recommend exporting a self-contained movie, maybe even try AIC, although it'll have to reconform back down to HDV for FW HDV output. Try all your various Mac voodoo steps before starting output - trash prefs, repair permissions, power-cycle everything. You can borrow my feathered headdress and tortoise-shell rattle if you want.
Sorry I couldn't provide a more definitive answer for you...
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