Choppy HD video playback please help!

Is the media optimized? Is it on a dedicated media drive?

Try selecting a few clips, right-clicking and choosing Transcode Media. Select optimized. Does this play better.

Your media, projects and events, should not be stored on your system but a dedicated external media drive.

60 Frames Per Second @ Optimized quality (ProRes 422)

This is not so little for a 5400 system drive... Do the math

Prores 422 = 145 Mpbs @ 60i -- you have 60p

In your case

300 Mega Bits Per Second (Divided) by the speed of your drive (Minus) all the stuff happening on the disk reducing your drive thruput like Virtual Memory etc etc etc etc etc...

According to my calculations, you are in for some serious choppyness ;-)

Create Proxy media (Easy in FCPx) of your files which will greatly improve performance.

Always -- KEEP YOUR MEDIA ON A DEDICATED SEPARATE DRIVE.. Preferable RAID0 or SSD via Thunderbolt ;-)

Zoomie86 wrote:

Also, whenever I just play the videos back (in like VLC or something) they play completely fine. Anyways, please help!!!

Steve

p.s. running 10.7.5 on OS X if that matters.

I have made a long thread about this problem,,,

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4802490?tstart=90

Look.... That is the way FCPx is NOW... Will it get better. YES.. I believe so.

You problem is NOT just related to FCPx's Atomic Resource Consumption... But to "Raping" your system drive ;-)))

Convert your original stuff to proxies and you will be flying... Revert back to high quality Playback when rendering out final....

This will get you working and off this forum and off the bad mood ;-)

USB2 should not be used for video applications. It's delivery speed is not consistent.

Zoomie86 wrote:

What's the difference between optimizing the media and creating proxies? (curious)

Optimized media = ProRes 422 which is easy to plyback for a computer ans has fairly high quality

Proxy Media = ProRes LT --- Low Resolution (4 times less the pixels) very easy to play back. NOT SUITABLE FOR Master Render

Thanks for posting!

It helped me too 🙂

I put video from three different cameras into one project in FCPX.

The three cameras were set up on different recording rates (1080i at 30 and 1080i at 60 FPS). Apparently the software played them all back, after rendering, and translated them into that jumpy video.

I created a new project and added only video from one of my cameras which had been set up on 1080i at 30 FPS, and it was smooth and clean.

I did this to each camera, and when exported I will put them together from the .mov files.

"1080i at 30 and 1080i at 60 FPS"

I'm sorry but what does this mean, or did you mistype? The convention is to write 1080i60, which is 29.97fps. There is no 1080i30, or do you mean 1080p30. This depends on the camera, many record with partial field over an interlaced recording. This can produce what's been called malignant PsF recordings, and really should be avoided. Only true progressive camera recordings should be used.

Is it enough to change the video to ProRes LT when making a multi angle clip or only when import initially? When I imported my videos, I checked both optimal and proxy so I'd have the option for editing and the final version. But getting the choppiness in editing now.

PProxy isn't ProRes LT, it's ProRes Proxy. Have you switched to proxy playback in the viewer.

In Preferences->Playback in 10.1.2, proxy playback isn't an option. It does have an option for "Create optimized media for multi cam clips" though. I have this unchecked. Am I missing something?

Also, I just bought a 1TB external hard drive and so far, so good.

CD