Getting dropped frames in capture, Final Cut Express 4

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Deromax Author

Level 1

33 points

Getting dropped frames in capture, Final Cut Express 4

MacBook Pro June 2009, 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB ram

MacOS-X Snow leopard 10.6.8

Final Cut Express 4.0.1

Capturing MiniDV from a Panasonic PV-GS300 camcorder to internal stock HD. Another Sony Digital8 cam also used.

This system was working extremely well, I have documented uptime over 120 days with 14 hours a day useage... Then I updated to Safari version 5 and something went wrong! I was able to get Safari and Mail back to work but now the system is barely useable for 2-3 days before I need to reboot because of clogged memory and sluggish performance.

Anyway, this message is mostly about my Final Cut Express giving me dropped frames while capturing. Most often it will abort capturing at about 3-6 minutes of capturing. It once got to 56 minutes then aborted. This makes for a not very productive day at work! :/

I tried everything I could think of : Running from a freshly rebooted state, no other applications running, disconnected the network, hard drive verified, permission repaired, having FCE save the capture in 1 GB individual files, etc. I tried to run the Activity monitor app while capturing and I can see nothing abnormal in the drive transfere rate or CPU activity that could produce disruptions at the moment the capture abort. Ia have seen a process about MobileMe running, MobileMe is no longer active of course. Can this be an issue?

One trick I found helped is manually stopping the capture at around 2 minutes, then resuming the capture. Then the capture will most always continu uninterrupted for the whole tape, even in LP mode (90 minutes).

This is pretty annoying. Capturing standard definition DV is not exactly overtaxing the hardware in 2012! I used to capture fine videos on a 600 mHz iBook G3 back in 2000 on the internal 10 GB drive! I have actually edited a whole video on a bus trip, on battery power, back in year 2000!

I'll repeat : this system was working very well since june 2009.

Thanks for your help!

MacBook Pro 15 inches (mid-2009), Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Dec 9, 2012 12:46 PM

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Answer 1

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Dec 9, 2012 2:28 PM in response to Deromax

I'd be wondering about your drive. How much space is free, as a % of total capacity? Have you run any tests on it – say, the Apple Hardware Test from the SL content disk?

If I understand correctly, you're using your boot drive as your scratch disk? If so, try resetting the scratch disk to a FW800 external for capture and see whether that works.

Is your cable a 4 pin to 9 FW (or something else); are you using an adaptor? Whatever, it's worth swapping out the cable to see if your connection is bad.

(That's odd about seeing the Mobile Me process running. It made me check AM…found nothing on Mobile Me.)

Russ

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Answer 2

MartinR

Level 6

19,217 points

Dec 10, 2012 4:32 PM in response to Deromax

Does this happen with both cameras?

Are you using an external hard drive? How is it connected to your Mac ... FW or USB? Is it connected the same time as you camcorder?

Are there timecode gaps on your tape(s)? This can happen if you stopped filming, turned the camera off, turned it back on and then started filming again.

Are you using Capture Now, or Capture Clip?

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Answer 3

Deromax Author

Level 1

33 points

Dec 10, 2012 5:40 PM in response to MartinR

Hello all. Here a few replies.

I'm using the internal disk. I have a 320 GB, 7200 rpm drive. At about 3.5 MB per second, DV will use about 1/15 of the available bandwith of the internal drive, it's barely doing any work! I happen to doubt that external disks are still requiered in this day and age, nor a fragmented disk will cause major troubles. This is no longer 1999 when disks were slower. The disk is curently 3/4 full but I have several big projects on it that were not there when the issue started.

Don't forget : this system have worked perfectly as-is, for years.

I don't have external Firewire drives to test.

I use a 4 pin to 9 pin direct cable, no adapters. Will try to find another.

I have not seen the MobileMe process since I first saw it. I went to System preference and noticed that MobileMe was still active. I turned all this off. We'll see.

I also turned off File sharing, but with the ethernet cable disconnected, I wonder how it could caue troubles.

I also tried a trick I have read about here, that is, put the Capture folder in the privacy list of Spotlight. I should be able to repport back about those changes in a few days.

The issue happens with both camera, with MiniDV, Digital8 and even live video pass-thru. The tapes I'm doing now are tapes that were exported from FCE a few years ago that I'm reimporting back to produce DVDs of them. They should have no timecode breaks. New material freshly shot on MiniDV is causing the same issue.

I'm using Capture Now. As I have stated, stopping the capture after 2-3 minutes and resuming it back will often works for an hour long subsequent capture.

I appreciate your efforts, but I think my issue is more involved. I think I should do a reinstall of the OS. I have not done this for a long time, I'm not even sure how to do it!

If it can help, when watching the capture process carefully, the captured image preview window will visibly stutter a second or two before the capture fails and halts. That should point toward a whole system slow down, not a drive slow down per se.

Thanks again!

Message was edited by: Deromax

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Answer 4

MartinR

Level 6

19,217 points

Dec 10, 2012 7:31 PM in response to Deromax

The disk is curently 3/4 full but I have several big projects on it that were not there when the issue started.

This is most likely the problem more than anythng else. Once your disk gets more than 50% full, performance decreases at a faster & faster rate as the disk fills up further. Yours is 75% full. I would never edit video on a disk that full, it's just asking for dropped frames. You won't see the decline in performance with ordinary file copying operations. But you will see it with video.

The stuttering you see is the system trying to tell the camera to pause the data stream, because the system can't continuously write to the hard drive ... there are many, microsecond i/o interruptions because the heads have to move so much when the disk is 75% full. But video data is streaming data, it can't be interrupted without causing dropped frames. The apparent randomness of the length of time you can capture before getting dropped frames is typical of this problem.

Take care of the disk space first; there's no reason to go all the way back to reinstalling the OS if you don't free up disk space first.

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Answer 5

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Dec 11, 2012 6:19 AM in response to Deromax

Deromax wrote:

Hello all. Here a few replies.

I I happen to doubt that external disks are still requiered in this day and age, nor a fragmented disk will cause major troubles. This is no longer 1999 when disks were slower.

Certainly, a lot of people would agree with that, but it is still not what Apple recommended while they were still marketing and supporting both FCE 4 and FCP 7 (up until 18 months ago). There are a lot of workflows and configurations that work…until they don't. They may not fail completely, but things might instead get glitchy – unpredictable.

Good luck.

Russ

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