Weird stuttering on a couple of scenes only
by Tom Matthies
on
Jun 1, 2009 at 11:55:30 pm
OK, before you go "Oh, another jittering playback" issue, this one is turning into a case of a project possessed by demons.
Sit back. This is a long one...
Here's the scoop. Got a call from a friend who was editing a DV project. He was having trouble with a couple of clips that were jittering on playback. The strange thing is that you could only see it on the canvas. The output, going through an Aja Io looked rock solid.
It looks like the clip would not just drop a frame or two, it actually looked like it would skip AHEAD and then fall back again. No dropped frame warnings at all.
OK, easy one, just recapture the clip, right? Nope, same thing. Again, no warnings of any kind. Looked bad on the canvas and fine on the external monitor. OK, I exported the clip through Quicktime to another format and brought that in. Still the same issue. I put the original tapes in and tried to capture via SDI. Same thing. I even tried to capture component analog and S-video. Same results. (!?)
I tried pasting the sequence into a new project. NG. I tried opening a different project and using the clips. Same. I tried it on my old G5 running FCP 5.1.4 and QT 7.1.6. Same again.
The original footage is DV shot on a DVX-100 in 24P (not advanced) and captured via Firewire to a FW-800 drive. All of the clips I tried recapturing went onto a 5-Drive SCSI RAID. Shouldn't be any drive issues. Eventually I even copied the entire project & media onto a fast RAID and it made no difference what so ever in playback. It never had the problem in the same place, and didn't always jitter, but if you played it back a few more times, it always did it eventually.
Since the footage seems (looks to) playback from the original tapes and also in the AJA output, I figured I'd just playout the original MiniDV tape and record a copy of the scenes onto a BETASP tape and then recapture that thru the IO. It's has to work, right? Nope, still the same problem. Grrr...
At this point all I can see in common with three different computers running different versions of FCP and QT is the project itself. I don't know how it could affect playback of these clips, but I can't see anything else in common.
Original project done on a MacBook Pro (IBM version) using FCP 5.1.4 and QT7.6. (Can you even run 7.6 on an older Mac without issues?) & OS 10.4.x
Also ran it on my MacPro (2.8 Octo) FCP 6.0.4 & QT 7.6 & OS 10.5
Also ran it on Dual 2.3 (IBM) with FCP 5.1.4 QT 7.1.6 OS 10.4
Tried to capture the clips in many formats. Tape seems to play fine in the deck. No servo errors at all. Even tried to capture with no device control just in case there was something funky with the timecode.
Any ideas on this one? I've run out of combinations to try.
Re: Weird stuttering on a couple of scenes only by Chris Poisson on Jun 2, 2009 at 3:23:26 pm
Well,
Tom, my friend, with your experience and knowledge, there's little I can offer except to trash your prefs. But that wouldn't explain the abberations on different machines, so it's possibly a problem with the footage from the camera.
