Final Cut 4 - Speed Control Issue, New Firewire Potential

[Richard Brown]

Well, I've had FCP4 up and running for a while now and find its 
ergonomics improved, but there seems to be an issue with Speed Control. 
I imported an edit from FCP 3 which features quite a few speed control 
segments (sports) and have noticed an odd aberration in playback - 
stuttering, almost like skip frame printing (in motion picture terms) 
where frame 1 plays, frames 2-4 are skipped, then frame 5 plays, and 
then the sequence repeats. This was in a RENDERED speed control 
sequence.

In one case I simply re-rendered the shot in FCP 4 and it played okay. 
In another, where the speed controlled footage was in a nested 
sequence, even AFTER re-rendering, the staccato playback continued.

Weirder, as I said, there's a LOT of speed control in this show. Most 
of it plays fine and without issue.

Going to look into potential hard drive issues, but I am not getting a 
"Dropped Frames During Playback" warning.  The footage in this case is 
spooling from a Firewire drive.

Speaking of Firewire, the new ADS external Firewire/USB 2.0 drives, 
with the new Oxford chipset are quieter, and, undocumented, feature 
circuitry which (on our first generation G4) breaks the 137 GB barrier, 
allowing full access to larger drives like the big Maxtors and Western 
Digitals (200-250GB) through Firewire. And that is on OLDER G4 CPU's. 
Pricing from the Net, you could put 1.16 Terabytes of storage online 
for about $1900, and 2.32 TB for under $4000. However, I believe Final 
Cut limits itself to 5 drives, meaning the 1.16 TB configuration is 
currently the largest. However, Maxtor's MaxLine series has a 320 GB 
drive coming soon, and these will up your Firewire potential to 1.48 
TB, given drive manufacturers lie about storage space, defining a 
kilobyte as 1000 bytes rather than 1024, and so on. Installing a 250GB 
in one of the ADS cases, it shows under Info as being 232 GB (at 1024 
bytes to a kilobyte), but also shows the total byte count at 250 GB.

Richard Brown