Capture Freezes on Frame, but audio keeps going

[jkaz]

Hi,

I am noticing that some of my clips have stalled on a random frame during playback while the audio continues as normal. After a second or two, the video jumps to its appropriate position.

Anyone have this issue before?

I read spotlight might be causing this problem during a periodic index of the hard drive... if this is true, how do I disable spotlight?

Thanks!

[ppc_michael]

Do you mean in the preview window during capturing, or when playing back a previously captured file?

If it's during a capture but the video ends up captured fine, then that's very normal. I don't know anyone who has a steady ~30/25 fps preview window.

If your video is captured that way, that is, watching it from your computer after you've captured it, then that's a problem that we'd need to know more about your setup to answer. Are you capturing to an external drive? What's the RPM of whatever drive you're using? What computer do you have? Does it look that way on the tape? What tape format are you using? Etc.

[jayeskreezy]

is it dropping the frames or just freezing and going? If it's dropping it then your clip will look like that too (i know b/c i experienced this last week )

if it's dropping then one thing is to try to optimize as much as possible like lower the memory it uses (if this is FC) and change some settings....

i had this problem last week and the thing that was causing it was that Iwas daisy chaining my external hd instead of connecting it directly to a firewire or usb port

[jkaz]

thanks for the response!

the clip on the mini dv is perfectly normal

the clip on the hard drive played as a quicktime file has the audio perfectly normal, but about 1 minute into the clip, it holds frame 01:06:02 until 01:07:00 with no loss to audio continuity and then jumps to proper frame and the clip plays perfect audio and video for remained of the clip.


this is on a G5 iMac, 10.4.9 and FCP 3.0.4, captured to internal HD

Thanks!

[ppc_michael]

Thanks for the additional info!

After you captured, did you get any warning about dropped frames during capture?

Generally you should use an external (or otherwise second) hard drive as your scratch disk to capture to, and it should be faster than most built-ins, at 7200 RPM. The reason for this is because writing DV to the hard drive has to be fast and work the first time or else it won't be able to catch up with the video playback from your tape. When you capture to the same disk you're running OS X on, it has to read/write system data as well as write the DV stream, all on a slower-spin hard drive.

But anyhoo, there's no real way to "fix" this with the file on your hard drive. I think your only solution, unfortunately, would be to recapture your footage.

[jayeskreezy]

Originally Posted by ppc_michael

Thanks for the additional info!

After you captured, did you get any warning about dropped frames during capture?

Generally you should use an external (or otherwise second) hard drive as your scratch disk to capture to, and it should be faster than most built-ins, at 7200 RPM. The reason for this is because writing DV to the hard drive has to be fast and work the first time or else it won't be able to catch up with the video playback from your tape. When you capture to the same disk you're running OS X on, it has to read/write system data as well as write the DV stream, all on a slower-spin hard drive.

But anyhoo, there's no real way to "fix" this with the file on your hard drive. I think your only solution, unfortunately, would be to recapture your footage.

ppc_michael is always on point...i agree...you should just try to get an external hd....i bet that's most of the problem

[jkaz]

I just found a possible solution to the video skipping problem on another Mac Rumors thread. Go into Spotlight in the system preferences and put your Capture Scratch folder into the privacy tab. It worked so far for me.

Thanks!