Jumpy Mouse & Dropped Frames Solved

17" MacBook Pro
2.4GHz Intel Core Duo
OS 10.4.11
QT 7.4.1
FCP Studio 2
FirmTek/2ENSM2 SATA Enclosure
2 - 500GB Seagate Barracuda Drives.

The other day I sat down at my MacBook Pro to start work on a new project, that involved capturing some DV footage from my DSR-11. As I was capturing and entering shot information, I noticed that the optical wired mouse (Microsoft) and USB external keyboard (Macally iMediakey) were behaving strangely. The keyboard was skipping characters, or adding extra ones and the mouse cursor was jumping around all over the screen. My first thought was that the USB ports had gone bad and that the MacBook would have to be returned for repairs.

At that point I wondered if the recent upgrade to 10.4.11 could be causing the problem. Sure enough, an Internet search revealed that 10.4.11 can cause the mouse to become jumpy when the MacBook Pro is looking for a wireless network connection (also a problem with Leopard 10.5.1). this problem was simply fixed by disabling the wireless lookup. I discovered that upgrading to Leopard 10.5.2 also fixes the problem with 10.5.1, but that can wait until after this project.

My second problem of the day was that I was continually getting the dropped frames message and capture was aborting when as I tried to capture to my external SATA drive. The drives are not connected as a RAID,but function as two individual drives and there was more than 200GB free on the drive. I tried capturing to the internal drive and that worked fine. So I repaired permissions, trashed preferences and still the problem of capturing to the external drive continued. In desperation I eventually moved everything off one of the external drives and reformatted it and now everything works as it should.

I learned two lessons today. (a) Not to upgrade anything until checking online to see if there are any issues and (b) To keep external capture drives clear and reformatted when starting a new project.

John

That could have been a file fragmentation issue on the externals-- something TechTool or DriveGenius handles. Also, you want to make certain the drives were properly Mac formatted (HFS Extended, not journaled.) An finally, capture short sections, not a full tape at a single whack.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:
Instantly find Next/Previous timeline Gaps with Shift/Option -G !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Loren,

I'm still a little puzzled over why it's not adviseable to capture a full tape/long clips. What are the complications?

> I'm still a little puzzled over why it's not adviseable to capture a full tape/long clips. What are the
> complications?

If you're editing in five-minute chunks of DV footage, then you're accessing files of around 1GB each. If you're editing from a mammoth one-hour clip, then everything you do in that one-hour section is accessing a 13GB file. If just one part of that file is corrupted, the entire one hour could go down the drain or start having problems.

Unless you're doing multicam, or have an insanely low amount of time for log/capture, the preferable way is always to capture shorter sections. It only costs marginally more time in the best of circumstances, and in fact is faster if you encounter problems -- eg. if the capture fails, you lost five minutes, not one hour.


www.derekmok.com

That's what i thought... Was just wondering if there are anymore issues with capturing long clips. And yea, i do it when i run really short of time- i'll do capture on straight on tapes, watch it all when it goes in and run through the entire clip later with markers. Or if i have that bit more time, subclip them or run dv start/stop detect (does dv start/stop detect work with SDI captured clips?).

Derek pretty much covered it. Subclipping won't help you, it still accesses the mammoth master. Subclipping, batch export of marked sections and *reimport* of discrete clips would, and you'd avoid that terrible consolidate issue where media manager tracks into the entire master just to copy used sections, which happens if your MM setting saren't just so-- and I'll be darned if I remember what they are! It'll probably be in the FAQ, tho.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:
Instantly find Next/Previous timeline Gaps with Shift/Option -G !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com