Full Screen Mode Picture Freezes but Sound works

Is your external video set to All Frames, or Current Frame?

The 5GB of hard drive space left could also be your problem. Drives slow down quite dramatically when they near full, and become very unpredictable. You should always leave at least 10% of your hard drive empty, for safety's sake.

Yeah, from experience, I know that low HD space means lag and is most likely the cause of the picture freezes.

What codec are you using. Digital Cinema Desktop only works for some codecs like DV, uncompressed, etc... It doesn't, for instance, work with PhotoJPEG. It will just hold the frame and play the sound. The image will update when you pause.

You might try opt p - to see if it will play back as fast as it can...

Patrick

For what it's worth, I'm having this same problem. It's very strange. I open up projects that used to work in full screen just fine and now they do the same thing you described - one frame is drawn and then no more. Then, when I stop playback, the image is updated to the latest frame. Audio is heard the whole time.

At first I thought I had some settings messed up on my latest project, but then I went back to old older project that I know worked in full screen mode last time I played it, and it does the same thing. Very weird, baffling, and irritating.

For both of you having problems, (as Thrillcat notes in the first response on this thread) make sure you have set the View>External Video to 'All Frames'.

What you describe is exactly what you would get if the setting is: 'Single Frames'.

x

I definitely had All Frames selected. Having fought with the problem for literally hours, I tried every combination of (relevant) settings possible. And double- and triple-checked everything.

I'm convinced there's a configuration bug in the software, since I didn't change anything in my project. The only change in my case was to add a 3rd monitor.

In the end, I trashed all my FCP preferences and let the software rebuild that directory tree. That allowed full screen video to work on the OLD projects that had worked in full screen before. And then I tweaked the sequence settings on the new project until I found that when I reset the sequence settings back to the NTSC DV template default, full screen now works on my new project as well.

So, I think I had two problems - one configuration bug in FCP and a sequence with settings that made it incompatible with viewing full screen. I've worked around both of those now and am back on track.

I believe that is what I asked - "What codec you were using?"

What did FCP think your sequence was using before you set it back to NTSC DV?

Patrick

What did FCP think your sequence was using
before you set it back to NTSC DV?

I'm not sure. I didn't write down the settings, and once I found that I could get it to view full screen, I didn't save a backup of the sequence.

Sadly I'm back to where I started somehow. In fact, I just created a brand new FCP project, right after blowing away my preferences, and it's doing the same old thing. Settings are 720x480 NTSC DV aspect ratio, NTSC pixel aspect ratio, Lower (Even) field dominance, 29.97, and DV/DVCPRO - NTSC compressor.

I can't get the full screen picture to work on either of my two monitors at the moment, both of which are connected to the same video card.