FCP6 Audio Problem

Hey All,
I'm coming across a frustrating audio problem, that seemingly starts in FCP6 (sometimes in iTunes) and ripples out to the Finder.

I'm working on FCP6 with native DVCProHD 720p/24pN media. As I'm working away (with no more than 2 sequences open at a time), as I start pounding away at the media, I start to encounter dropouts, loss of sync, and general slow down on playback. I go to iTunes from there, and audio will either stammer/stutter, or not play at all... audio files won't move forward a frame or will not be responsive to "clicking play". I go to my sound settings in system prefs, and my Output Settings revert to "Built in Audio, though the audio is clearly coming out of my headphone jack (once I quit FCP, over time it reverts back to the correct setting). I also notice that at the finder, for a very short time upon quitting FCP/iTunes, windows are then slower in response to commands (RAM?), and the volume tool stutters through its "quack" sound effect as I raise and lower master sound level in OSX, and ultimately the entire system ends up mute altogether. At this point I unplug my stereo out jack and the audio remains mute, though my Sound Settings in System Prefs are not responsive to revert back to "Built in Audio."

Here's my specs:
Dual 1.8 gHz G5 with 3GB DDR SDRAM running OSX 10.4.10. FCP and iTunes media are on external 500gb firewire drives, each coming in directly via FW800 onto a seperate bus via PCI cards (no daisy chaining). All of the drives have at least 10% free space. Audio out is from mini stereo headphone jack to RCA hooking up to a standard analog home stereo system.

My system should be strong enough to work FCP at my working res without an issue (and never has given problems like this before).

I restart and though audio will be back to normal at first, the issue comes back again after a while. Trashing my FCP prefs does not seem to work. I have no other external devices plugged in besides my printer via USB (no external video output or hardware attached).

I am upgrading to FCP 6.0.1 and QT 7.2 but I don't think those will fix the issue.

Anyone have any ideas? Encountered something like this before?

Thanks,
Francisco Bello

Do you get the Spinning Beach Ball?

How full is the System Drive? How many external drives do you have? That's just academic interest because you're doing it all exactly correctly, but still.

The 10% thing is after all the render, waveform, and capture files get saved.

Open the activity monitor and try to see what device is backing up. Another possibility is open a Terminal and run "top." That will give you a list of the most active things on your machine.

It is possible you have a damaged clip or something like that. You do know not to put "/" marks in filenames, right? Any virus software running?

Koz

Hi Koz,
No spinning beach ball.
All the media file names are numerically based since they came from the HVX (so there's no weird characters in the file names). No virus software running here either.
I keep all my drives at least 10% free of storage out of habit.
I have opened activity monitor and nothing really popped up.
I have about 18 gb free on my 74 gb system drive.

Back from my days as a PC user (ohh I miss that old 486) there used to be crazy things that could happen with a sound card, but to my knowledge MacPros don't have anything of the sort.

Francisco

First I'd shut down the computer and disconnect all internet devices. Restart and try the audio for awhile. That way we can rule out any internet-related causes. Also, if iTunes isn't playing the files properly either, I'd go in and disablle all the "helper" preferences -- Gracenote CDDB (the "Get names from internet" option), Keep Library Organized, Use Track Numbers in File Names, etc. Anything automatic. All that useless, automated file management just sucks away at your system resources.


www.derekmok.com

Also, I know neither you not anyone you know ever does this, but if you have 5,428 things on your desktop, the Graphic Manager has to devote resources to each and every one.

Koz

It might be a good idea too to run the Console and Activity Monitor apps while you're working. The minute the audio starts to freak out again check both the apps -- Console will alert you to any errors or other weird behavior and give it a time stamp, very helpful in diagnosing a problem. AM will show you all running processes and if something suddenly jumped to the top of the list and started consuming too much memory or processor power you'll kow what the culprit is.

GL, JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Francisco,

I experienced a similar problem a while back although I was cutting 8bit uncompressed in FCP 5.xxx. Here's what I figured out. My internal drive needed to have plenty of free space 10 Gb or more. My media drives (G-Raid 2 500 Gb FW 800x4 not chained) each needed to be no more than 2/3 full. Whenever I exceeded this, I experienced constant dropped frames, audio sync slippage while performing edit to tape to Beta SP. I was surprised at this since I have 5 Gb of Ram in a pretty fast G5. When I stuck to these rules, no problems.

Thanks Evan. I'm thinking that might be it. Need to buy new drives anyway so some reshuffling of media may be in order. Couldn't hurt.

<<<My internal drive needed to have plenty of free space 10 Gb or more. My media drives (G-Raid 2 500 Gb FW 800x4 not chained)>>>

<<<Couldn't hurt.>>>

No, it couldn't.

I bet a lot of chocolate that the "10G or more" easily violates the universal rule of having 10% free space on each drive the system can see.

Also, I'm sure you're top dog in the neighborhood for active spinning platters, but even though you're clearly not constrained directly by FireWire conflicts, the machine still has to manage all that stuff. This is the storage compliment that may require a Quad or 8-banger processor machine to efficiently use. I bet you would be way far ahead by disconnecting most of that external storage and just use the single stack that you actually need to get the job done.

I can't believe these words are coming out of my mouth, but you may have too much storage.

I have one modest, stable machine that worked very, very well and I was happy using it. I decided I was tired of swapping external drives, so I bought a 500G internal drive and all but destroyed the machine. Everything took four or more times longer as the machine struggled to keep up with file management on a suddenly huge storage system. I had to take it out. So it is possible to badly mismatch the drive system and the machine, and mismatching it either direction is bad news.

Koz

I am running my media from (4) Lacie 500gb drives (wanted g-raid or better, but budget wouldn't allow it)... So Koz if that's what you're eluding to re: mismatch of system to storage that's possible.
Let's see what happens.
If this is the case can always go to a SATA array- had great experience cutting with the same codec on one of those.

I would try playing the files from a different user account and I would also run Disk Warrior to clean up the directories.

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

<<<(4) Lacie 500gb drives >>>

That would be two TeraBytes of storage not counting the internal drives. That is a F*** load of storage for a Dual 1.8 GHz machine to manage in real time. Remember that comment you made that you couldn't go past a certain about of data on each drive before the system would throw up?

It didn't actually throw up, it slowed down to the point where it couldn't do live video. The upper end of storage you can connect to a G5 it right up there, but if you actually go Right Up There, it's not going to be fast.

Koz