Stuttering During Playback

Hello All,

We're cutting storyboard animatics using small JPG stills. Nothing crazy. We've tried stills in JPG and TIFF format, but nothing doing ... here's the issue.

When we playback strictly audio, the viewer, canvas, external monitor all play fine. As soon as we hit the stills in the sequence (with audio), the playback starts to stutter everywhere - even with the external monitor turned off. We have tried the "fit to window" in the canvas - still the problem persists during playback.

We're cutting at 23.98 fps, 1920x1080 using FCP Suite 2.0. on a Mac Pro:
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005C.B08
SMC Version: 1.7f10
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT

Any and all troubleshooting suggestions are appreciated. I look for this issue on the wiki, but couldn't find anything. If I'm just missing it, I apologize to the moderators in advance (and would love a direct link so as to not miss it again).

Thanks, in advance, for any and all suggestions!
-Travis-

What is your media drive?

Have you rendered the stills?



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Stills have been rendered, yes.

Media drive is an internal seagate barricuda 500GB with plenty of space available (over 400GB).

Is it okay to run uncompressed JPG's 10-bit real time? Perhaps that's our issue?

Your HDD is not fast enough to playback 10bit HD uncompressed.

Make the sequence in ProRes 422 HD and you should be fine.

10bit uncompressed is WAAAAY to high a datarate for a single HDD.

Did someone tell you it could handle it?



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Thanks, Ben. At the risk of sounding totally uneducated (or maybe that ship has sailed ...) ...

First of all - this worked. So thank you again.

Secondly - why ProRes 422 versus ProRes 422 HQ? We did HQ and that worked.

Third - how do we bring our still files (currently JPG) in so that they're natively "happy" without having to render? They currently come in with a green bar. Granted it's a faster render than the red, but ... still a render.

Thanks again!!!

The difference between ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ is a matter of bit rate. ProRes 422 HQ uses more bits per second than regular ProRes 422 does. Many people claim that they can't see the difference between ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ. ProRes 422 HQ will definitely hold up better over multiple generations, but lots of people say they can't see a change in ProRes 422 over many generations, so it's dealer's choice.

You cannot use stills in Final Cut without rendering them. Stills aren't video.

Either PR422 or PR422HQ is fine - seeing as you are doing animatics I wouldn't waste the disk space of HQ.

If you set you playback settings to Unlimited RT and Dynamic for Video Quality and Framerate.

You should be able to get a modicum of realtime playback but might be low quality until render.

Try it and see.



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Thanks, all! We're going PR422HQ for now - this has to do more for our "down the road" plan of dropping in grayscale animation (after conferring with that side of the team).

We set our playback settings to Unlimited RT and Dynamic for video quality & framerate. This did, in fact, help. But the render time is so short that we're not really going that route.

Thanks again, Ben and Jeff!!! LAFCPUG saves the day once again!

You are welcome.

Quote

Unlimited RT and Dynamic for video quality & framerate

Keep those settings if only to get a quick feedback on anything you do or apply to the timeline.

The other thing to set is in User Preferences:




Your Mac is more than capable of playing back high quality audio so why use the limiting defaults?



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]