choppy video in viewer.

Hello,

I am working on a project that someone previously was working on In iMovie. To get it into FCP I exported the project from iMovie at full quality, I then opened the project in FCP, loaded the sequence into the timeline and rendered it. When the sequence plays in the canvas everything works swimmingly, but when I try to view individual clips in the viewer it's very choppy. Does anyone know how I might go about solving this?

Thank You,

Ramsay

The first and simplest explanation I can think of is that your Viewer display is set to larger than fit to window. Select the Viewer, press SHIFT-Z and play the clip again, see if it improves.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks Derek. It is set to "fit to window," but it's still playing back weirdly. It will play smoothly for about a second or two and then stick on one frame for a second or two and then play smoothly for a second or two and repeat ad nauseum. Is there anything else I could try?

You say you're using a movie-file export from iMovie. What format is the file? What codec? Where is it located (drive location)?


www.derekmok.com

Hi Derek,

The file is DV/DVCPRO - NTSC. I have the file on an external firewire drive.

If I take one of the clips and throw it into the timeline and then render it, it plays fine in the canvas. Is this a render issue? How can you render clips before working with them in the timeline?

If you've exprted out of iMovie then it's likely to be dv stream codec, yes? Not straight DV. I don't use iMovie but I know there are incompatibilities, so what your seeing is possible the computer struggling to play non-native video in the viewer.

I'm just guessing here though, no fact - hopefully someone else with know more, or it will give you a jumping off point for your own research.

You could throw the entire media in the timeline, render it, export it as a quicktime movie (not a qt conversion) and then reiport to work with it natively.

Thanks Jude,

That seemed to work. Great suggestion.