Timeline playing stuttering issues

Hi I have a fairly simple FCP 7 project made up of stills cut to beats of music...about every 4 bars so aren't that many stills. It's just a cheapie rock video to put on facebook for now.

When I try to play it back in the timeline it stutters and stops. My sequence preset is
blackmagic HDTV 720p 59.94 Uncompressed.

the project will be output for the web but possibly for DVD. definitely not blue ray.

I have a mac 3GHz dual core intel machine with 2 Gigs of ram
FCP 7.6.3

I have never had this trouble before and have used FCP for years.

the project is stored and playing back from an external G Raid 1 Tb drive by firewire 800. I monitor it out thru the black magic intensity pro card to a wide screen TV.

Very frustrating. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

If it's just stills and headed for FB, you don't need to use such a high frame rate. Use 23.976.

What is the resolution of the photos?
Are you rendering out the timeline or playing it back with a green or other coloured line in the render status display?

Is your project file AND the source photos on your external drive?

Is the music track a WAV or AIFF file or is it an AAC or mp3?
Is it a 16 or 24 bit file?
Is it 44100Hz or 48000Hz?



How full is that drive?


Put your project file on your system (internal) drive.
Make sure all your media, (photos, music etc) are on your external drive.
Lower the frame rate of your sequence
Make sure the audio is a 48KHz AIFF
Make sure your sequence is also set to 48KHz
render it all.

Report back.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Uncompressed HD at 60fps? Way overkill for a project like this, in my opinion. I'm also willing to bet that when you wrote "G-Raid", you actually mean a G-Drive. A RAID0 should be able to handle what you're talking about, though I'll also admit that whenever I've used Uncompressed HD, it was always targeted for broadcast, so frame rates were always restricted to 23.98fps or 29.97fps.

You have FCP7. You should use ProRes or ProRes HQ.

As Andrew recommended, lower your frame rate, and I would also change your codec. And check to make sure the stills you're using are not overly large. Stills over 72ppi will often stall FCP drastically, despite the fact that ppi, independent of pixel count, is supposed to have no bearing on file size. But in my first-hand experience, FCP chokes badly on stills with a high ppi setting, as well as stills with too high a frame size..


www.derekmok.com

You guys are probably right about the 59.94 frame right being too high for this. That's probably for something going to a full high def blu ray project, right?

I was under the understanding that I can't just change the frame rate-time base after I had put my stills into the time line. Is that true.? If yes, that means that I pretty much have to start all over with my project, right?

the hard drive is a "G Raid Mini" that they sell at Fry's connected with firewire 800.

I process the photos by making a 1920 X 1080 photo shop file at 72 dpi. It's a locked master. Then I drag any stills I want into that and scale them up as necessary. Therefore all stills are 72dpi and i flatten and then name and save them as Tiffs (out of old habit... don't know if you still need to do that ....but it generally works for me)

All files including the project file are on the external drive

audio file is 48K aiff 16 bit on the same external drive
audio settings say 48 kHz 16 bit.

I have trashed prefs, run mac janitor and disc utilities. all is good, supposedly

I guess the big question is, under Sequence Settings , what should they be including co dec.? this is something I don't understand very well.
Right now it's frame size 1280 X 720 . aspect ration HDTV 720p (16 X9)
pixel aspect ratio square anamorphic not checked editing timebase 59.94 quick time video settings compressor none quality 100 percent

Hope this helps.

No you don't have to start again.

Make a new sequence with the proper compressor codec (see * below) and frame rate.
In you original sequence lasso/select all
in the new sequence past.
There might be a few gaps things you'll have to watch for (unlikely with stills though) so you might want to step through the sequence and check it after.

*Make your new sequence a ProRes(HQ)1280x720 (or 1920x1080) square pixels at 23.976fps. The uncompressed setting is far too high a bandwidth codec for your system and is giving you nothing in return except hassles.

If you are processing your photos to 1920x1080 and then blowing them up in FCP you are throwing away resolution and picture quality. Depending on how much you are blowing things up you can bring in larger photos and blow them up in FCP and still maintain quality. You don't want any photo to be larger than roughly 3500 pixels on either dimension. FCP chokes on really high resolution photos.


Move your project file onto your system/home drive. i.e. in a well named folder inside your documents folder.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

> I was under the understanding that I can't just change the frame rate-time base after I had put my stills into the time line.

A timeline's frame rate can't be changed if there's any content in it. You need to start a new timeline, then paste the stills over.

Bus-powered drives are a lot slower than proper drives -- lower RPM, smaller disk inside, overheating issues, hangups. They're also more expensive. Unless you're editing on a plane or a train, you should be using full-sized 7200rpm drives with fans, with an independent power source.

> what should they be including co dec.? this is something I don't understand very well.

The codec -- short for COmpressor DECompressor -- is the encoding algorithm used to make visual images into digital information. Think of it as being a lens through which your video information is being shot again. The cleaner it is, the better your images and more information you retain, but the bigger files you'll get.

Neither of the two options you named (frame size 1280 X 720 . aspect ration [sic] HDTV 720p) has anything to do with the codec. But you began by saying you're using Uncompressed HD. That is absolute overkill. We used to use it for HD broadcast, or for capturing primo HD-sourced material where we wanted to squeeze every bit of available video information out intact. To give you an idea of how overkill it is, Uncompressed 8-bit video at 1920x1080 and 23.98fps is 1GB every 10 seconds.

With your project, you should just use ProRes 422 or ProRes HQ. It's a heavily compressed codec that yield manageable file sizes while giving good quality.


www.derekmok.com

Thank both of you very much. I will apply all of that today and hopefully, all will be well. The G Raid is not a bus powered drive . It is a regular powered full speed drive.

Thanks again. I'll report back if any more problems.

Okay, had some time to play with this and still having problems
AV settings apple pro res 422HQ 1920X 1080 24 P 48 khz
video playback Blackmagic HD 1080p 23.976


Sequence settings 1280 X 720 HDTV 720p (16 X 9) (this is the only setting that fills my TV properly)
square pixels

compressor apple pro res 422HQ quality 100%
audio rate 48
bit depth 16 bit
Problems:

1. the clips don't change from one to the next on the TV monitor even though they play correctly on the Canvas

2. I have one composite of 2 frames and it plays correctly in the canvas but not on the TV monitor