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Home: Video University Forums: Mac Video:
Problem with smooth rendering in FCP. Complex situation.

DVman
User

Feb 10, 2006, 6:45 PM

Post #1 of 4 (717 views)
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Problem with smooth rendering in FCP. Complex situation.	Can't Post

I have a Power Mac G4 1Gh computer using Final Cut Pro HD, 756 MB of RAM memory. A Sony DVcam deck is connected and also a Sony NTSC monitor. Just recently I started to notice that my rendered clips were not as smooth anymore after applying my effects and rendering. I have been editing for two years on this computer and never had a problem like this. It is odd and it happened all of sudden and I don't think I did changes to any settings. Not quite sure.

I went to the Sequence setting and in the render control I changed the Frame Rate from 25% to 100% and also the Resolution from 25% to 100% and the problem seems solved but it takes much longer to do the rendering. When I had the Frame rate and Resolution set at 25%, the clips were smooth after rendering. Now I have to do them all the way to 100% !!!

I wonder what may have caused this type of problem in my system.

One more thing I noticed this morning, the Canvas in FCP looked quite pixelated and even my the Sony external monitor connected to my MAC showed a low resolution image. This somehow it cleared when I dumped all the preferences and rebooted several times.

I was wondering if this may be caused by what I did yesterday. I cloned my system drive using Carbon Copy to a firewire drive. After cloning, I booted from the firewire drive and suddenly the desktop shown on my computer monitor started to be really unstable waving considerably on the display monitor. I shut down the computer and rebooted as usual with my internal system drive (not the cloned drive) and everything seemed fine. The question is, would booting from the firewire cloned drive damaged somehow my firewire connection or any part in the computer. I am wondering if that has any relation with the problem I am describing.

Any help or suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

(This post was edited by DVman on Feb 10, 2006, 8:31 PM)

RatVega
Enthusiast

Feb 10, 2006, 7:51 PM

Post #2 of 4 (712 views)
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Re: [DVman] Problem with smooth rendering in FCP. Complex situation. [In reply to]	Can't Post

If you take a sufficiently geeky perspective, the possibility that the clone copy is damaged is fairly good.

In today's computers, we take a lot for granted. One of those things is the goodness of a copy. If you cloned, say, 50GB from the system drive, that's about 400 billion ones and zeros. The probability of a single bit error is pretty good. If the bad bit is in a video file, you'd probably never notice a shift in the color of one pixel. No biggie. But if the error was somewhere in the FCP code or the operating system, it could subtly change something...

Run Disk Warrior on your system and then on the drive with the clone copy. See what shows up.

A better method might have been to do a clean install of OS X and FCP to the FW drive and then copy over the rest of the data. Yes, I know it takes longer but the probability of success is greater.

Firewire issues have been known to cause malfunctions and/or damage to a firewire drive, but I've never heard of anything affecting the computer. Firewire connections are also known to occasionally abruptly go bad, causing mount and read/write problems but then the drive would probably not mount. I'm betting it's a copy thing.

______________________________________________________________
Currently on a loaded 2.5GHz G5 dualie/5GB/1TB internal RAID/dual 19" monitors. Final Cut Studio, Adobe Suite, Boris RED. Shooting with Canon.

VU California Crew, Inland Empire Sub-Chapter (paragraph?)

DVman
User

Feb 10, 2006, 8:19 PM

Post #3 of 4 (709 views)
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Re: [RatVega] Problem with smooth rendering in FCP. Complex situation. [In reply to]	Can't Post

I don't know if I made myself clear. But I am not using the clone drive. I am using the system drive and that is where the problem shows. After I cloned the drive, I booted from the clone drive, saw it working, shut it down, unplugged it and stored it. And then I used my system drive. The problem happens from my system drive, not the clone drive.

And about firewire drives not causing damage to circuit boards, may be you are right. But once I damaged a firewire port by plugging a camcorder incorrectly somehow into the firewire port. I had to send the computer to Apple to have it repair.

So, I am still at large with this rendering issue.

In Reply To

If you take a sufficiently geeky perspective, the possibility that the clone copy is damaged is fairly good.

In today's computers, we take a lot for granted. One of those things is the goodness of a copy. If you cloned, say, 50GB from the system drive, that's about 400 billion ones and zeros. The probability of a single bit error is pretty good. If the bad bit is in a video file, you'd probably never notice a shift in the color of one pixel. No biggie. But if the error was somewhere in the FCP code or the operating system, it could subtly change something...

Run Disk Warrior on your system and then on the drive with the clone copy. See what shows up.

A better method might have been to do a clean install of OS X and FCP to the FW drive and then copy over the rest of the data. Yes, I know it takes longer but the probability of success is greater.

Firewire issues have been known to cause malfunctions and/or damage to a firewire drive, but I've never heard of anything affecting the computer. Firewire connections are also known to occasionally abruptly go bad, causing mount and read/write problems but then the drive would probably not mount. I'm betting it's a copy thing.

(This post was edited by DVman on Feb 10, 2006, 8:33 PM)

RatVega
Enthusiast

Feb 10, 2006, 8:59 PM

Post #4 of 4 (690 views)
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Re: [DVman] Problem with smooth rendering in FCP. Complex situation. [In reply to]	Can't Post

Sorry about the misunderstanding.

About the only thing I can think of that would cause the machine to be affected by booting from a different drive would be that you somehow have altered the NVRAM on the main logic board that holds basic set-up info (such as video resolution) for the system. Search for "reset NVRAM" on the Apple site for the exact resetting sequence.

It is certainly possible to damage the firewire component on the main logic board. The firewire port is powered, and inadvertently shorting is never a good thing. This usually makes the port dead. I've killed several... But I have never seen (or heard) this cause a general system malfunction such as you describe. There is also an outside chance that you've suffered an unrelated failure of some type in the system coincidental to the copy, but I'll stress outside.

______________________________________________________________
Currently on a loaded 2.5GHz G5 dualie/5GB/1TB internal RAID/dual 19" monitors. Final Cut Studio, Adobe Suite, Boris RED. Shooting with Canon.

VU California Crew, Inland Empire Sub-Chapter (paragraph?)