Whirling cursor reverse telecine!

For some reason I'm getting the whirling cursor of death when I try to play some reverse-telecined DV NTSC footage in Final Cut Pro. Any thoughts on what the problem might be? My sequence settings are the same as the footage. I tried changing settings, but to no avail. Odd, but it's having a similar problem when I attempt to play the clips in Quicktime. In FCP it stops and I get the whirling cursor. In QT it plays, then gets lost for a bit and recovers if I select a later portion of the clip.

Sounds like the source file is in some way not okay. Do a get-info on it in Quicktime Player and let us know what it says? Also, how did you go about removing the pulldown?

Not exactly sure how the pulldown was done. It's from a class and apparently it's worked in the past.

Here's the stats when I do 'Get Info':

Dimensions: 720x480
Codecs: DV/DVCPRO - NTSC, Integer (Big Endian), Timecode
Duration: 01:42
Channel count: 2
Total bit rate: 24,559

Yup all looks fine from here. Maybe you're dealing with a framestore problem. Try copying the Quicktime to another disk and playing it from there. With DV25, virtually any disk you have available should have plenty of bandwidth to play it back.

Also check every drive connected to the system, make sure none of them (including ones that aren't being used by the edit) is over 90 per cent full. I'm with Jeff -- either it's a drive problem, or there's corruption in the media.

And you're not using a USB drive, are you? Where are you storing your media? Do you have any Powersave settings (OS System Preferences) on? A drive that goes to sleep (eg. Western Digital MyBook) can also cause the Spinning Beachball of Death.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks, guys.

Well, it ended up being a simple solution. I restarted and everything worked again. No more spinning beach ball. My best guess is that the memory cache got full and it was only able to run smoothly again once OS X had emptied it. I try to restart these computers as little as possible since they're set up with internal RAIDs, but that appeared to be it.