Dropped Frames

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Dropped frame warnings from Final Cut Pro during playback (as well as dropped frames during capture and output) are probably the most common thing that happens to all Final Cut Pro users at some point or another.

One of the quickest and easiest things to try first is to repair permissions as described earlier. If that doesn't do it, the problems almost always stem from hard drive issues, but there may be a few simple things to check inside Final Cut Pro first. So we'll start with those possibilities first:

1. Overlapping windows: The Viewer and Canvas windows should not overlap for best performance.

2. Log and Capture window open: If the Log and Capture window is open in the background while trying to play a sequence you may get playback problems.

3. Canvas window is zoomed in: If you see scroll bars in the Canvas, you are zoomed in too far for clean playback.

Set the window to Fit to Window or smaller from the Zoom pop-up button in the Canvas (keyboard shortcut is Shift/Z).

4. Playing Unlimited RT effects: When you play back effects in real time, and the effect has an orange color above it in the Timeline render bar, this indicates that this will play back but it will drop frames during playback. The color indicates that this is a very intense effect to play back in real time and is overly taxing Final Cut Pro.

To avoid these dropped frames, simply render the effect. Or if you want to preview these effects without rendering and without the dropped frames warning, uncheck the options in the warning window. Re-check the warning in the User Preferences to turn it back on when you need it.

5. Not enough RAM for current setup: Thus may affect your system in a couple ways- dropped frames and a possible "sluggishness" where overall performance drops. When opening big projects with lots of sequences and clips, you may get more dropped frames. This is especially true of multiple open sequences at the same time or very long sequences. Try closing other sequences and/or breaking the project into smaller projects. Too many items in the Browser can also be a problem. Too much RAM usage based on User Preferences can also limit performance.

Recommendations for Final Cut Pro 6:

• 2GB for compressed HD and uncompressed SD

• 4GB for uncompressed HD

Specific reasons RAM is being overly taxed:

• Multiple open sequences: Try closing sequences not currently being used.

• Long sequences.

• Too many items in the Browser: Whether its too many clips or sequences, many Final Cut Pro editors will often break a project up into multiple smaller projects for better performance.

• Long sequences in Final Cut Pro prior to Final Cut Pro 5 experience more of these "Preparing for Display" issues. Updating to Final Cut Pro 5 or later fixes this problem in some cases.

• Last but not least, the issue also may be related to other applications being open, and reducing the amount of available RAM. The system starts using "virtual memory" which will definitely make your Mac sluggish.

• A sequence that contains too many short clips: Many clips that are very short in duration could cause dropped frames. One solution is to turn the multiple clips into a single media file by exporting a self-contained QuickTime file. Re-import this file and replace that section of the Timeline with the new clip.

• Final Cut Pro User Preferences- Depending on your choices in the user Preferences, performance can be affected. This includes:

            - Levels of undo
            - List Recent Clips
            - Limit Data Rate (Limit real-time video)
            - Real Time Audio Mixing

6. Hard drive issues that can cause dropped frames:

• Media hard drive speed: the speed of your capture drive may not be fast enough for the type of media you are working with. This is a very common problem. At the end of this section on dropped frames, there is a series of charts outlining the data rates needed for various formats.

• Media hard drive too full: If a media hard drive is over 90% full, you will most likely get dropped frames. This is also a very common scenario. On a FireWire hard drive, you may find you need to preserve more empty space on the drive for peak performance, keeping the drive under 80% full.

• Internal boot hard drive is too full. Although your media drives run the media, your main hard drive being too full can also lead to dropped frames. Avoid letting your internal boot drive get more than about 60% full.

• Fragmented media drives: if the capture drive is fragmented, in other words files are written to the drive in a non-sequential order, this could also lead to dropped frames. Files are stored as smaller "pieces" on the drive. This causes the hard drive to have to "jump" to different sections of the drive to playback media. It is not advisable to use a de-fragmentation utility on media drives (also known as "optimizing"). Instead, one way to de-fragment a drive is to temporarily copy all media on the drive to another (backup) drive. Then erase the original media drive and re-copy the files from the backup drive back to the original media drive.

• Hard drives going to sleep: There is an option in the System Preferences that determines whether or not your hard drives spin down when not being used. This should be turned off. On a laptop, this setting may be turned on by default.

                1. Go to the Apple menu > System Preferences

                2. Click on the button Energy Saver.

                3. Make sure the button for putting the hard disks to sleep is not checked.

• FireWire drives daisy-chained: Multiple hard drives connected to the computer will start to affect the performance of all the connected drives. Even when connecting through a different port on the computer, all the FireWire drives on a Mac share the same "bus". Even FireWire 400 and 800 ports share the same bus. Add an additional FireWire bus to a desktop Mac by way of a PCI card to eliminate this problem.

• Using a FireWire hub to connect multiple drives. This is also a problem as all these connected drives are still connected to the same FireWire bus.

• Connecting camcorder to a FireWire drive for capturing: If you are experiencing issues capturing video while your camcorder is daisy-chained through a FireWire drive, try disconnecting the drive and capture to the internal system drive (for low date rate material like DV).

• Using the USB 2 connection to connect from media drive to computer. This is not recommended on a Mac.