Final Cut Express 4 Question

[msft138]

I just recently bought final cut express 4 and I am having problems capturing my footage. When I go to capture, the video jumps and doesnt play all the frames then the program says there are dropped frames. The tape plays fine thru the dv player and I tried numerous tapes bit no luck. If any could give me some tips that would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Much Ado]

Well for a start, don't worry about the jumping whilst capturing, that's pretty normal. Your Mac is busy capturing the footage and not playing it back on screen for you. So long as it plays fine through the camcorder it should be okay, and it should all capture.

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As for the 'real' dropped frames: what machine are you using? On my G5 it drops frames during capture whenever I do anything other than leave it alone, even just moving the mouse annoys it. Try leaving the CPU to capture on its own for a while and see if that works.

External drives are also unpredictable, if you're using one of those...

[I use FCE a lot, but never read any manuals, so this is only from experience.]

 

[msft138]

I have a macbook 2.2ghz with 4gb ram. I bought a belkin firewire 6pin to 4pin, it was pretty cheap. Would that maybe have something to do with the dropped frames?

 

[Much Ado]

Firewire is fine...

When does it say there are dropped frames? Is that during capture, or when you play it back after? (If it's during playback then that just means you haven't rendered the footage yet. Apple+R will sort that.)

 

[zschiffman]

I just recently bought final cut express 4 and I am having problems capturing my footage. When I go to capture, the video jumps and doesnt play all the frames then the program says there are dropped frames. The tape plays fine thru the dv player and I tried numerous tapes bit no luck. If any could give me some tips that would be greatly appreciated!

i've never used FCE4 but when I use FCP2 and have a dropped frame issue I set my device settings to "non-controllable device". This setting doesn't read time code and will ignore dropped frames. There is also a setting (in FCP anyways) in preferences to ignore drop frames and warn after it is done recording.

 

[serega]

I've had experience with dropped frames on Win machine, which not related to computer. Tried everything and discovered that it happened always at same point on the tape, then I found that that point where I was where I was played tape and then recorded again. All I needed to advanced tape to after that point and was no more dropped frames. Just my 2 cents.