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Final Cut Issues - "skipping/jumping frames"

Hi guys, I've been dropping braincells left and right trying to figure out what could be causing this problem, maybe someone reading this has a solution or a suggestion;

In a nutshell, once we've compiled and burned our DVD, we end up with a "skipping/jumping" frame here and there. Noticeable.

This doesn't seem to affect the audio at all, but simply watching it, seeing a frame "jump" and/or "skip" (within the same shot, that is) is really beginning to annoy me, as I'm sure you can imagine.

We can ever know if and when or where this issue will occur until we actually watch the DVD, so you can imagine my frustration of waiting 16 hours for my rendered DVD, sitting down and then seeing this problem again and again.

The jumping and/or skipping frames are never the same. Either they're at the beginning of the film one time, or in the middle another time, near the ned another time.

I was expecting another DVD this afternoon from the guy doing the actual rendering/burning, but got an email from him a little while ago informing me of "yet another delay blah blah".

Each time he has an issue, I have to wait days (nearly a week, that is) for another rendered DVD.

My "guess" (I'm no editor, bare in mind I'm just the director) so my technical knowledge of this is nearly moot, however, to me, this feels like it could be simple problem being overlooked on his end, like, perhaps;

1) maybe he's doing other things on his computer whilst rendering?

2) maybe his computer just can't handle the processes? (Macbook, Final Cut Pro 6)

3) maybe tiny nano-bugs are shitting on the files and laughing at me?

ANY tips, advice would be GREATLY appreciated.

SH
 
I always come away from the Apple forums with the idea that nothing works, but in my day to day production work, I only run into occasional problems. Reading the forums is like watching the evening news. If you take the evening news too personally, you'll be afraid to drive, swim, walk, or even flick matches into a bathtub full of gasoline. :devil:
 
Hey guys!

Great news; My film is now complete! Rendered, compressed and burned!

If you'd like to view the details, let me know. I'm not sure I can or should post a link to the official website in this particular thread.

All in all, it took roughly 5 hours to render, and another 6 hours to compress n' such.

Just watched about an hour ago and shut the DVD player off with a large smile on my face. No skipping frames, no jumps, no out of synch audio. Couldn't be happier!

You guys are great with your tech knowledge and I can't thank you enough.

SH
(T.M. Langseth)
 
If all else fails and compressor is still giving you bad results, try exporting your movie from FCP as a self contained DV NTSC .mov file. What are you using to author your DVD? I would then try using DVD Studio Pro to author the DVD. You can import the .mov file you exported and DVD Studio Pro will compress and encode the video for you, and then burn to a disk. As you have already been advised, I also would use a -R disk. Good luck. As a side note, I had a really weird problem once that I never figured out: when I authored a DVD in DVD Studio Pro I got some artifacting at a certain point in the video, however when I authored the same video with iDVD there was no artifacting. It must have been something with the compressors, but I never found out. Maybe try using iDVD to author if all else fails.
 
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