Repeated aborted captures because of dropped frames

It seems that since I use a CANON mini-DV camcorder, my Apple Software requires that I capture directly to the internal drive, instead of onto the external G-RAID (which I purchased from the Apple Store with the express purpose of capturing video from my Canon ZR500!).
Now onto the next problem (It seems I am to battle this software at every step in the process, right? It never does "Just Work", does it?):
After two aborted attempts to capture a 60 MN tape onto my internal hard drive, what do I do about dropping frames. Is this because of "Bottlenecking", something I heard happens and is exactly why we DON'T want to capture onto the computer's internal drive? How do I capture a tape onto my internal drive without repeated aborted captures because of dropped frames?
It's going on day two with this software, and not a single frame of tape has been imported successfully yet. . .

Go to User Preferences > General. Uncheck "Abort on dropped frames" and "Report Dropped Frames." I have found that the dropped frames are unnoticeable while editing and during playback.

Similar Messages

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.

FCP crashes when capturing uncompressed video/drops frames on playback

I have just started using FCP 6 but had similar problems with 5. FCP seems to work fine with lower data rate captures and playback like DV25. When I try to capture uncompressed 8 or 10 bit SD or HD it will capture for a while then eventually crash. Shorter captures of 20 or so minutes will work ok but then the video will drop frames and stall on playback. It will suggest lowering real time audio tracks, changing the RT settings etc., but it is only a 2 audio track capture with video and RT is already set to dynamic. I have successfully done this before so I know the hardware is capable, I have captured and played back 1.5 hours of continuous 10 bit uncompressed SD without incident. The system hasn't had a lot of other stuff installed on it. It seems like there must be some sort of software conflict.

I am capturing to a Ciprico dual channel U320 array attached to a ATTO UL4D SCSI controller. I don't use the system for these data intensive captures all that often and sometimes I have no problem at all and other times I do. I noticed that the raw movies would play in the quicktime player ok without stalling or dropping frames so the issue seems to be with final cut. The last time I had this problem was with playing back 720p DVCProHD files and it would only play for a few minutes and then give a error message about dropping frames and suggesting lowering the number of audio tracks and changing the RT settings. I am thinking there must be a software conflict. We just installed FCP 6 and this was the first capture I did with it and had the same old problem right off the bat.

Abort Capture on Dropped Frames Feature is Not Saving Captured Media

I have searched for this specific problem here without any results. I'm simply capturing regular SD DV and am getting dropped frames. Even though the dropped frames is an issue that I shouldn't be encountering, that's not the reason for this post. The bigger problem is that FCP 6 is not saving the file prior to the abort.
The manual specifically states on page 308 Part IV " Abort capture on dropped frames: When this option is selected, capture stops immediately when a dropped frame is detected. All media captured before the dropped frame has frame-accurate timecode and is preserved. The resulting media file is saved and a clip for that media file is placed in the Browser."
Well the issue is, FCP is NOT saving the file to my hard drive much less it's NOT placing the clip in my Browser. I can spend 50 minutes and get a dropped frame and it aborts capture (that's what I want it to do) but the time spent capturing that 50 minutes of media is simple gone. Poof, no file, no nothing. So what gives, anyone else seen this problem?
I am up to date on all software.

Hi Michael, thanks for the feedback.
I have a MacPro 2.66 GHz dual-Core Intel Xeon with 5 GB of ram. Internal 250 GB system drive with an additional internal Seagate Barracuda 750 GB drive 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s drive Model number ST3750640AS which I have captured my previous project, and now am capturing only my 2nd project to.
Note: I have only captured 2 projects to date on this new Mac. The first project consisted of around 5 tapes which I captured each one using the CAPTURE NOW feature without any problems (with the exception of the reset timecode which FCP handled as advertised and stated below). So far I've captured 10 tapes from my 2nd project. So I still have well over 500 GB free on that drive.
I am capturing via firewire from a Sony DSR-11. I only use one brand of tape, the Panasonic AY-DVM63AMQ. My cameras are 2 Sony VX2000 and one VX2100. I know for a fact that I need to replace the internal battery in my oldest VX2000 because every time I turn it on, I get a warning that I need to set the clock, and everything else has reset itself to default settings. However, this is not the camera that I have been experiencing timecode reset with. It's my other (not as old) VX2000. I don't use my cams to capture to the computer, that's why I purchased the DSR-11. With this camera, it will reset timecode frequently with the camera still powered on, but stopped (not pause mode). The tape is not being previewed or anything causing it to play past the preexisting recorded media which wold in fact cause a timecode reset as you stated in your last message. So I don't know what is wrong with this camera, I'm fairly certain the internal battery is good because it keeps time on it's own. I'm hoping it just needs a good cleaning, but I'm afraid it may be something worse. I'm getting ready to send it off for a checkup this week.
In any case, about 80% of the time, FCP has been able to properly detect timecode reset when it is encountered, and it does in fact pause recording, save the first file, and reposition itself to the new timecode and start recording a new file as advertised. The other 20% of the time it has simply paused the DSR playback, saved the file, and informed me that the tape has reached the end of the recorded media, which it hasn't but In these cases it's not detecting a timecode reset. I then have to press the stop button in my capture window to actually move the deck from pause to stop mode.
Now, the dropped frame issue on capture is a separate issue. According the the FCP manual (as I stated in my first post) it is suppose to abort capture, but still salvage what has been captured thus far, and it is not doing this. Thus far over the course of these first 2 projects on my Mac, I have only encountered dropped frames on capture twice, and both times while capturing from this 2nd project. The first time this happen, I was doing a lot of stuff in the background, i.e. checking email, browsing some web site, but nothing that consisted of playing video or audio, and I was doing some iChat (simple chat, not screen sharing or video/audio conferencing or anything like that. So I attributed my drop frame to the fact I was doing too much in the background. I then decided that I would NOT be playing around in the background any more while capturing. So I was quite surprised when I received yet another dropped frame notification at around 50 minutes. It did about capture as advertised, but it did not salvage the media it had already captured.
So... that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Thanks for your time, I appreciate the help.

Dropped Frames During Capture but no Warning

Hello!
Set up: iMac 20" (early 2006) with 512RAM, Acomdata 250GB External FW HD, Canon GL1 as FW Deck.
When I capture video the process always seems to work, no error messages and yes the dropped frame error boxes are checked in User Preferences, and I always receive the "successful" message when the capture is done. But when I play the video there are numerous dropped frames.
The source tape is fine.
Both external devices are plugged into the iMac's FW ports, not daisy chained. The HD is brand new with no data on it and formatted as Mac OS Extended
I guess what bothers me most is the system does the captures regardless of dropped frames or not - and without any warnings.
What can I do to fix this?
Thanks!

As a normal workflow you may have to capture to the
internal hard-disk.
Generally, as a rule, a drive other than your system drive, if connected and formatted correctly, should be more reliable for capture and output than the system drive, but when the job needs to gets done - whatever workaround works, eh?
I'm with andy though that the thing that scares me the most is that FCP alsmost never seems to abort on dropped frames on either capture or output. I have seen my output freeze for 10 frames at a time, audio disappearing, huge multi-frame digital glitches in DV capture with the scrambled rainbow video and loud screeching audio hit. An output of a 1-hour doc - Uncompressed to DBC via our AJA Io from the RAID - opened up a 6-frame black hole in the output - playback just topped for 6 frames. The only way I knew to even look for it was because I checked a match frame at the end of the tape and my video was out of place by 6 frames. If that's not a "dropped frame" I don't know what is. I've seen this on 3 different workstations, from 4 different decks, using several combinations of input/output hardware, and in all cases, FCP just glitches away without ever aborting or alerting about dropped frames. I'm so paranoid now about my masters (some of our output is for broadcast) I keep reviewing them over and over.

Non Drop frame capture causing out of sync clip?

Hi, All,
I've been having trouble with sync issues on an hour long tape capture.
The material was captured from a Canon consumer DV cam (z80) using firewire into my powerbook g4. (The material on the dv tape was originally recorded in Video 8mm and transfered to the Canon via firewire from a modern Sony Digital 8 camera.)
The sync on the DV tape looks fine when I play it back through the Canon camera. So I'm guessing that I might be losing sync because the camera is dropping frames that don't want to be dropped. I tried to change the video capture settings to non drop frame (in the device control tab of FCP5's audio video settings preference window,) but as soon as I start the capture from the canon, the settings on my log capture window automatically revert back to drop frame. (I don't know this for a fact, but I do notice that the ":" in the timecode box turns back to ";" every time I start the capture.
Does this sound like it is, in fact, a drop frame problem? And if so, is there any hope of getting a canon consumer camcorder to capture at non drop frame rates?

Well, after trying most of the suggestions here, I did find a reasonably hassle free workaround to capturing the hour and fifteen minute footage of 8 bit 32 kHz video to FCP with minimal sync slippage over the length of the footage.
I finally gave up on capturing the material in FCP and instead hooked the canon z80 up to an old version of Toast Platinum 6 I had on my computer. Toast creates a raw quicktime movie file with the extension .dv. Toast then allows you to edit that quicktime file, add chapters, button pictures, etc. thereby making a new file to replace the raw QT it first created. After some experimentation, I discovered that the original raw QT file Toast creates can simply be dragged intact to the FCP browser window, where it becomes a clip with minimal sync problems. I would caution against trying to use the second improved QT file that Toast creates after you've edited your file, as this second QT movie seems less stable than the raw one it first creates.
A final caveat for Toast users. Make sure you set the preferences so that they don't DELETE the original file it creates. There are settings that will tell Toast to do just that either After a Day, After a Week, When You Close the Program or Never. I'd set that to Never, since it can be highly unpleasant to discover that your program has deleted the very file you were planning to work with.
Hope this is of some help.
Thanks to all who pitched in and offered suggestions. Your help has been invaluable!
I now mark this issue Solved. Or at least as Solved as I plan to get it!

Capturing 1080i 59.94 with 1200A deck - dropped frames on capture

Hmmm...
I'm trying to capture some HD footage, and FCP keeps aborting the capture with a dropped-frames error immediately at the beginning of each clip it attempts to capture.
I've been capturing HD with my current setup for about 8 months without running into this problem, but I'm throwing new variables into the mix this time so I'm thinking it might just be something I'm missing.
I have 24p footage shot on a Fujifilm DVCPRO HD tape with the Panasonic Varicam at 720p. I need to capture it as 1080i at 59.94 due to broadcaster delivery specifications. So I changed the appropriate menu settings in my Panasonic 1200A deck ("Sys Format" from 720p to 1080i and also the menu setting #632 to 720p> HD_OUT> 1080i) in order to capture the 720p stuff as 1080i.
Capture Preset: AJA Kona 2: 1080i 59.94 DVCPro HD
Device Control: AJA Kona 2 59.94 Panasonic VTR
So I'm attempting to capture to two 500GB G-RAID drives (which are striped together as a RAID) via SDI through my Kona 2 card. As I mentioned, I capture material with a similar configuration daily with no trouble.
I did some research and came across a site that had a list of all the deck settings for the 1200A that need to be set to capture 1080i 59.94, and made sure the settings on my 1200A matched.
After I received the dropped frames error a couple of times and checked that my set-up is correct (to the best of my knowledge) I tried capturing at 720p 59.94, and it worked flawlessly. I then tried capturing at 1080i 29.97 and that also worked fine. So it seems there's a hiccup with the combination of 1080i and 59.94, which I can't figure out.
I also tried duplicating the capture preset and changing the Advanced Compressor settings to DVCPROHD 1080i60 from Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 to see if that would help, but no dice.
I'm going to post this on the Cow Varicam forum as well, since 8-months is still pretty new to this menu-heavy deck and perhaps that's where my trouble lies.
Can anyone shed some light? I hope I didn't leave out too many specifics.
Thanks a lot,
Joni

I don't think your drives, even though they are raided together, are fast enough for 1080i60.
Plus, you will be wasting a lot of space capturing this way. You shot 720p so capture and edit 720p. When your cut is locked, THEN uprez to 1080i60 (dropping it into a 1080i timeline and rendering) and output.
But you will still need faster drives for the output.
That is what I am doing. We shot 720p24, but need to deliver 1080p24 10-bit uncompressed HD. The software uprez looks great.
Shane

Capturing non-drop-frame as drop-frame??

I have to capture a bunch of amateur tapes shot with various cameras. Ultimate destination is NTSC DV. I have a sense that if I capture the non-drop-frame in a standard NTSC DV setup that I might have some buggy problems. Or at least the batch capture is telling me so.
I've never come across this problem before. What should I do? I'm just trying to build a movie database for a CEO using all the stuff he's collected from various sources - wanting all the captured material to be easily editable in FCP.
Any help would be most appreciated,
Ben

Well, after trying most of the suggestions here, I did find a reasonably hassle free workaround to capturing the hour and fifteen minute footage of 8 bit 32 kHz video to FCP with minimal sync slippage over the length of the footage.
I finally gave up on capturing the material in FCP and instead hooked the canon z80 up to an old version of Toast Platinum 6 I had on my computer. Toast creates a raw quicktime movie file with the extension .dv. Toast then allows you to edit that quicktime file, add chapters, button pictures, etc. thereby making a new file to replace the raw QT it first created. After some experimentation, I discovered that the original raw QT file Toast creates can simply be dragged intact to the FCP browser window, where it becomes a clip with minimal sync problems. I would caution against trying to use the second improved QT file that Toast creates after you've edited your file, as this second QT movie seems less stable than the raw one it first creates.
A final caveat for Toast users. Make sure you set the preferences so that they don't DELETE the original file it creates. There are settings that will tell Toast to do just that either After a Day, After a Week, When You Close the Program or Never. I'd set that to Never, since it can be highly unpleasant to discover that your program has deleted the very file you were planning to work with.
Hope this is of some help.
Thanks to all who pitched in and offered suggestions. Your help has been invaluable!
I now mark this issue Solved. Or at least as Solved as I plan to get it!

Drop frames capture

i have a macpro 2.0 xeon 3 gb ram and the last final cut and quicktime. during the capture i have drop frames (i trying to edit a concert with multicam 4 cameras) importing from a dvcam deck i have drop frames, from a samsung minidv i have drop frames, i am using a internal SATA drive for scratch only for fcp. what's wrong?
(with a old vaio with vista and vegas 8 i have made a cature 4 hours of video entire tape at once to internal hd and edit of multicam with no problems....this is ridiculous....)

Don't know how new you are to FCP so have a look first at one of Shanes Stock Answers
Shane's Stock Answer #12: Dropped frames on capture/playback
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58640
1) Do not capture to your main system drive. Since it is busy reading the operating system and application files, it will intermittently drop frames during capture. Capture to a separate internal drive, or external hard drive (firewire and eSATA for example).
2) Deactivate any anti-virus/filesaver software, including Norton and Virex. For some reason these programs think that the large files created when you capture media are in fact caused by some sort of virus, and they try to prevent this.
3) Check the format of the drive you are capturing to. It should be Mac OS Extended, journaling off. If it isn't, copy your files from it and re-initialize it. If it is any other format, you will encounter problems. If not at first, then eventually.
4) Trash the FCP preference files. Use FCP Rescue available here:
http://www.fcprescue.com
5) Make sure that the hard drives you are capturing to are fast enough to handle the footage being captured to it. A regular firewire 400 drive cannot capture uncompressed HD, or even uncompressed standard definition. A RAID array of drives might be in order for these formats.

Dropped frames in FCP 6.0.4

Hello,
I have just shot a wedding and have 4 x 40 min. mini-dv tapes that I have captured. I had the 'there are dropped frames' message after capturing the footage but have had this before several times and have not experienced any problems so just ignored it, however this time appears to be different.
My audio is way out of sync with my video because the audio obviously continued to be captured over the dropped frames which has pushed the video out of sync.
I am half a country's distance away from my physical tapes so cannot re-capture the footage. I have isolated the dropped frames within FCP using the 'analyze long frames' tool but would really rather not have to go through the icky process of re-aligning the audio with the video between these points.
I was really hoping that someone may know of a plug-in that could do this re-syncing job for me, I have googled but couldn't find anything, this or any other help/advice would be much appreciated.
Cheers.

My current thinking is I will have to make the journey to perform a re-capture, but to make sure the journey is not in vain should I amend my user preferences?
I have the 'sync audio to video source if present' checked which I think could be causing me problems, because FCP might be trying to sync audio to the dropped frames, which is causing the sync-issue.
I have the 'abort capture on dropped frames' unchecked, otherwise the capture would be ridiculous.
Is the only practical solution to dub the tapes to new tapes with unbroken timecodes? Help much appreciated.
Thanks.

Drop frame - how do i know if my fotage has a drop frame?

hello,sorry about the stupid question,but dhow do i know if my fotage has a drop frame or not?
thx

To see if the footage you captured was recorded with drop frame (the default) or no-drop frame timecode, right-click on a clip and select Item Properties to check the frame rate.
For the 'dropped frames' question, if there were timecode breaks or other problems with the recording on the tape, FCP will either abort capture at that point, or start a new clip depending on what you've told it to do in preferences. The dropped frames on capture condition can also happen if there is a data throughput problem (I/O error) during capture.
For dropped frames on playback, you may sometimes get that warning if your system can't keep up with RT playback. To see if there actually are dropped frames, go through that section of the clip frame-by-frame to see if there appear to be any.
-DH

Dropping frames after Motion stabilization

Hello,
I'm having a weird problem with Motion and FCP. I'm running FCP Studio 2 (FCP 6) on a MacPro Intel Dual-Quad Core with 2GB of RAM and a Kona 3 card. My media is on 2 internal hard drives - SATA 7200, 500GB each, speed=3gigabits.
I'm working in Apple Prores 422 HQ. When I open my project and play my sequence it plays back fine. I send a clip to Motion (with embed motion content and launch motion checked) and apply motion stabilization; save then quit. I go back over to FCP and I can't play my timeline for more than a couple of seconds before I get dropped frames. It's not just when I play the new Motion clip in the timeline - it's everywhere and it's random. This happens before and after I render. If I remove the motion clip I still get dropped frames. If I shut down FCP without saving and reopen the project (no Motion work having been preserved) it plays back fine. I've tried trashing prefs to no avail. Any advice? I like the elegance of this workflow...if it works! I'm wondering if this is a bug that updating to FCP 6.0.1 will fix.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts...

Alright...I tried a clip using Smoothcam and you're right - fabulous results, analyzation and render times were actually quite fast. However - same dropped frame problem I was getting with Motion. Exact same problem. My system is beefy enough for this, right? I have 2 GB of RAM - I had 5 GB but AJA had me remove 3GB so that I could capture Prores HQ (apparently the Kona 3 with v 4.0 software has a bug that won't allow it to work well on systems with over 2GB of RAM - i.e. couldn't capture prores without dropping frames)
I'm trashing prefs and restarting my system. If this doesn't work I'm going to try updating everything unless anyone out there knows what might be the culprit.

Abort capture on dropped frames disabled

I am fairly new to Premiere Pro CS4, but when I am trying to capture HDV from my Sony FX1 and in the capture dialog box as well as the edit>preferences>capture dialog box the option "Abort capture on dropped frames" is disabled. What am I missing? Is it because I am trying to capture HDV instead of DV? Thanks in advance.

It depends on the capture material.
If you're attempting to capture analog material - like VHS - in bad condition and fed to an Digital-to-Analog converter that's not a deck and doesn't offer device control (like a Dazzle Bridge), the potential for unavoidable dropped frames is huge.

Capture on the fly dropped frame aborted capture - clip gone forever???

I foolishly set up my Macbook pro to capture the video feed live from an HVX200 camera via firewire... THE clutch interview for a client... Lo: what happens but halfway through the interview, capture aborts and error message reads "capture aborted due to dropped frames".
It's an investigative journalism project, with a hostile interview subject, so no do-overs possible.
Clip not showing up in capture scratch or anywhere else.
My question is: has anyone had any luck rescuing an incomplete clip like this? The hard drive was churning, doing computerlike things, writing, so the information is there somewhere. It's just that the "pointers" or "handles" of the clip are gone. I know with IBM/Avid there's an attic where you can get to weird and/or incomplete files - is there anything like that with MAC/Final cut? Or is this setup "all or nothing"?
Maybe someone knows about a program that can recover incomplete data, good for MAC?
I know, shame on me for capturing straight to computer - I'll never do that again.
thanks!
Jeremy

has anyone had any luck rescuing an incomplete clip like this?
Nope. The file failed to complete...QT/FCP didn't get a chance to write the end code for the clip, so it is unusable.
I know with IBM/Avid there's an attic where you can get to weird and/or incomplete files
The ATTIC in Avid terms is the same as AUTOSAVE in FCP...it saves a backup of the project bins, not the media. Not sure about the IBM attic...
I don't know of anyone having luck recovering a file that has been aborted like this. And this happens to more people that we'd like to see. Capturing one-of-a-time events straight to computer with no backup. Bombout.
Shane

Capture Keeps Aborting at 7 Min Saying "dropped frames"

After a recent update from Apple (to QT and iTunes) FCP suddenly stopped capturing beyond 7 min. I tried over and over again, switched disks, ensured space was there, tried different points on the tape, etc... No dice. No matter what I did, after about 7 min of capture it would stop and give me an error about dropped frames. If it is something to do with the updates I would think others would be having the same problem, but haven't seen anything on the discussion board.
Any idea where to start on this? Thanks in advance!
Using FCP HD 4.5 with JVC HR-DVS3U Deck

So, if the forum bite-backing is done...
FCP 4.5, QT 7.3, 10.3.9,
Dropped frames roughly every 6-7 minutes.
Details:
First, did a clip set to be an Hour or so long capture. Ran into the first dropped frame error. Tried again, about 3 times. Tried to do a simple manual Live Capture. No dice.
Said, F-it. Made several clips of roughly 6 to 12 minutes each. Varied in size and so forth. 10 clips. 1 out of 10 was actually captured. After multiple attempts to do a batch capture. Was reduced to capturing each clip one at a time. By the way, the successful capture was 3:16 minutes long. An unsuccessful capture was as low as 4:00 minutes long.
Then a painful run through of the clips, each checking at exactly WHAT TIME the frame drop happened. There seemed to be a 6-7 minute pattern on the TIMECODE.
BUT WAIT, there is more...
I have been capturing other video quite successfully all last week and this frame dropping issue just STARTED yesterday with this particular problem. This was a brand new tape (because I've had this happened on tapes I've reused) No muxing around with settings. I've checked all my settings and Safe RT is on, Low bit Quality, 2:2:2:4 is the pulldown pattern. I'm recording the internal drive. There are no CDs in the disk drive. I'm about ready to set up clips where I can TRY to avoid the dropped frames by stopping the capture before the time it is dropped.
Ah, the computer in question is a G4, 867MHz, 1.12g ram, with a Canon GL2...while it is a cranky computer, it has served in good stead.
I await with eagerness of your replies.

Repeated aborted captures because of dropped frames

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