Jumpy/Jittery Video in FCP Windows

Okay, this is super weird and I'm not even sure if I know a good way to describe the problem, but here goes.

I'm having a recurring problem with video being played back in FCP really...off. It's hard to explain how it looks, but it's kind of like when you're watching video with a lousy internet connection or a computer that can't quite keep up. It's jerky and strobe-y (that's a word, right?) and it looks pretty terrible. Most of the time, the problem is only in the canvas and not the viewer, but sometimes, it's the other way around and sometimes, it's present in both windows.

Most times, it will fix itself after I restart the machine, but other times (such as right now), it's a little more stubborn. The video looks fine if I export a Quicktime movie and watch it in Quicktime player, but it looks all jittery in FCP. Also weird: only certain sequences in the project have the problem. However, if I copy and paste the clips from the problem sequence to a new sequence, the jitters get pasted right along with it.

Is this making any sense to anyone? I'm not sure that I'm doing a very good job describing the problem, but it's super frustrating. The fact that it's so unpredictable and could show up in a variety of different ways is driving me nuts. Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks guys...


Final Cut Pro 7.0.3
Mac Pro (Early 2009) - OSX Lion 10.7.5
System Drive - 640GB SATA (245GB Free)
Scratch Disk - 1TB internal SATA Hitachi drive (288GB free)
2 x 2.26 GHz Quad Core Xeon
6GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 Graphic Card (512MB RAM)

Could be that you're cutting in the wrong frame rate.

That you aren't using a supported editing format in FCP 7 and the system got over taxed. Does FCP 7 crash shortly after those jitters?



www.strypesinpost.com

[However, if I copy and paste the clips from the problem sequence to a new sequence, the jitters get pasted right along with it. ]

That's probably because they're drawing from the same media which is likely on your system drive-- maybe some big renders?

Easiest way to diagnose what's where in a project is to quit FCP, dismount the external, reboot FCP and look in the Reconnect Media window to see what's being called for and from where. Ideally all your media should be offline-- your timeline should be white. But if you see a partially filled timeline then you're drawing from master clips or renders which were deposited in a Capture Scratch folder on your SYSTEM drive-- and these should be moved to your scratch drive at the earliest to avoid the jitters.

The only other thing that comes to mind is the video format load. You don;t say what format you're in, or whether this is effects-heavy. One or two streams of HD is about all a single SATA II drive can handle without issues. A render is considered a separate media stream and is saved as such. It belongs on your media drive.

I use exactly the same Mac Pro (although with 24GB RAM-- consider an upgrade to 12GB). I use dedicated hard drives and even a small RAID for a few streams of HD media-- nothing goes to my system drive except project files, Autosave copies of the project, thumbnail and waveform caches. I get very good playback.

HTH

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Advance to next/previous keyframes in a clip with Shift/Option-K !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide™ Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Thanks so much for the help guys...

Sorry, I forgot to mention that the clips were all ProRes LT at 23.98. I haven't cut anything other than ProRes in a while, so I'll try to mess around with some DVCPro HD stuff later on to see if that could be the problem. The clips are from a 7D that I transcoded to ProRes in MPEG Streamclip. I assume this could be caused by using incorrect settings during transcoding?

[Does FCP 7 crash shortly after those jitters?]

No, never crashes, it just plays all wonky.

[One or two streams of HD is about all a single SATA II drive can handle without issues.]

What do you mean by streams? There are several layers of video in the timeline, but I get the feeling that's not what you mean. All my media and render files are on a separate internal drive from my OS.

[consider an upgrade to 12GB]

On my to-do list, believe me...Thanks again guys, really appreciate it!

> What do you mean by streams? There are several layers of video in the timeline

That's what "streams" are. Two clips overlapped means you're playing double the video information at the same time. Once exported as a movie file, it's flattened, so it's back to one stream. That explains the stuttering playback. And exporting is not a real-time process, which is why the lagging data rate doesn't carry over.


www.derekmok.com

Ok, thanks Derek...I'll play with it tonight and see if getting rid of the bottom layers helps the problem any.

>I use exactly the same Mac Pro (although with 24GB RAM-- consider an upgrade to 12GB)

Not in FCP 7. FCP 7 sips RAM, and is only allowed to use a maximum of 2.5 gigs of RAM for the app itself. This is because of the limitations of the 32 bit environment that FCP was coded in.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quick update...got rid of all the extra layers so all the clips were just in a continuous stream on one layer. The problem was still there, and remained after several restarts. I guess the stars aligned after the fourth restart because the problem went away then. It's a crapshoot whether or not it'll show up today.

Any other ideas or help is always apreciated. Thanks guys!

Gerard-

[Not in FCP 7. FCP 7 sips RAM, and is only allowed to use a maximum of 2.5 gigs of RAM for the app itself. This is because of the limitations of the 32 bit environment that FCP was coded in.]

Very true, but if feels so... so ROOMY. The main advantage is the ability to load Photoshop and/or Motion and other useful stuff during a session. That does accelerate the work.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Advance to next/previous keyframes in a clip with Shift/Option-K !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide™ Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

I've had a very similar problem, if not the same with FCP 7. I'll preface it with this, I was editing a tv show last year on an iMac (don't know specifics, freelancing for a company and used their comp) it used Snow Leopard. I was transcoding footage to ProRes 422 and editing was a breeze.

I upgraded my personal equipment in July of 2012, bought a new iMac running Lion with 12GB RAM, editing ProRes footage and even using the same type of external drive (WD My Book Studio) using FireWire 800 to connect to my comp.

When I use MB Looks or Colorista I noticed that once rendered it would playback with a jitter. Figured that it was nothing, exported the footage and the jitter transferred to the QT and to DVD later. So, I used the 3 way color corrector and the same thing happens. And now, any footage that is renders will playback with a jitter that transfers. It's not the footage, it plays back fine in Premiere CS5 even after using MB.

Would this be some sort of render issue? I've talked to everyone I know and no one seems to have any idea. Sequence settings match the footage. I would edit in Premiere but, still learning it and not anywhere near as proficient as I am with FCP.

tried it again

Once rendered it looks as if it is skipping frames, but it's actually skipping AND adding frames... I can undo and it goes back to normal. I can render and then delete the color corrector and it goes back to normal as well.... This happens with anything that is rendered, not color corrector specific.

So, decided to go into the user settings and look around. Apparently FCP7 was set at 50% on render frame rate and speed. Changed those to 100% and BAM, problem solved. I then went back to projects that had output the choppy footage, changed the seq settings to match and it works like it should.

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I think I've figured it out and want to see if anyone can confirm it for me. I continued to have the same problems with 7D footage transcoded to Prores playing back jumpy and jittery. On a whim, I re-transcoded everything to DVCPROHD and the jitters went away. My capture scratch is an internal Hitachi SATA drive and I'm starting to think that it's just too slow to handle the Prores footage.

Does that sound about right? Do I need to get a RAID to cut Prores footage? I assumed that an internal drive would be faster than an external drive hooked up via Firewire 800; is that not the case?

Again, my system is:

Final Cut Pro 7.0.3
Mac Pro (Early 2009) - OSX Lion 10.7.5
System Drive - 640GB SATA (245GB Free)
Scratch Disk - 1TB internal SATA Hitachi drive (288GB free)
2 x 2.26 GHz Quad Core Xeon
6GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 Graphic Card (512MB RAM)

Thanks for the help...

anthem: ProRes HQ requires 176 million bits/sec for 1080 24p. Which SATA hard drive can't output data at that rate? FireWire800 connection should also be possible. RAID setups become necessary only when the ProRes edit involves many simultaneous streams.

You can test whether your hard drive is the bottleneck by setting up an alternative super-fast RAM disk and copying the footage into it. Make RAM Disk 1.0 is freeware which works fine on my Snow Leopard system, but I don't know about Lion.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany