QT movie is still drifting

[Fokke van Saane]

Setup
PT 6.4.1 , MIX+ +2merle farms
Adat bridge, Rosetta 800 (master clock)
G4 dual 1.25 1 GB RAM
Canopus ADVC-100
Quicktime 6.4
OS 10.3.4

I reported this earlier, but nothing has changed since then. I read reports from others that they have the same problem.

After about 20 mins of continious playing my quicktime movie starts to drift. If i stop, and continue where i stoppped sync is back. Its just a very small drift, but enough to make directors worry. Its not a problem on short playbacks, but when i do a viewing its really annoying that i have to press play/continue to get the sync back.

I only work with PAL, 25 FPS quicktime movies. They are captured in FCP from a DVCam machine, or they are exported from FCP.

It has nothing to do with the movie offset setting. It is on 17 qrt frames here, and its sync. But only after a long run the sync will drift. Its about 1 or 2 frames after 20 mins, not more, but its clearly offsync.

I think it has more to do with the quicktime player then with protools. My guess is that the QT player is playing from the system clock, where my PT clock is running from the Apogee Rosetta.

Can you, Digidesign confirm this?

Fokke van Saane

[dbto]

I'm not sure if this is your problem or not, but there has been a known sync issue with DV loaded via firewire from a camera, where frames are dropped. Apple seems to have fixed the issue in iMovie, but I'm not sure about FC (have you updated all of your software?). A quick fix (and peace of mind on ProTools), would be to view the loaded video frame by frame with time code burned in, and look for jumps in time code (indicating missing frames).

Again, this may not be your problem, but this is/was a common problem with OSX and Firewire DV. I was having the dropped frame issue, and since updating all software and patches, seems to be running stable.

Are you using Full Quality video, or only reference video (smaller file size)?

You can search the Apple Discussion Forums for more on the dropped frame issue.

Don Barto, Jr.
Soundriven, Inc.
[email protected]

[froyo]

By Fokke Van Saane

After about 20 mins of continious playing my quicktime movie starts to drift.

Hello. Fokke this may be a childishly, over simplistic workaround, but it may be worth a shot until they fix the problem. Have you figured out at what point things start to drift? Is it with non drop and drop frame rates?

Because if you know for a fact that you are OK up until the 17th minute for example, just author 17 minute QuickTime movies. That way you can be assured that all is OK. I would think maybe some testing may help there. Determine exactly at what point the drift begins.

Here's another thing I don't remember from your thread from last year. Do you know if this happens in other applications? Say a QuickTime movie in Logic or Digital Performer or Nuendo, etc? If it does then it would probably mean it is a QuickTime issue. If QuickTime's stay solid in other applications then it would be a Pro Tools issue.

[Fokke van Saane]

Thank you for your concern Don,
But as you already mentioned, this has nothing to do with my problem. A dropped frame is a dropped frame and if you play a short piece it still will be a dropped frame.

Your suggestion, watching a 40 minute film frame by frame means watching 40x60x25 = 60000 frames. Who wants to do that?

To reply to your email, yes, i have dropped frames here too now and then if i load from a DV deck into FCP. I always check the first and last frame after capture to see if they have the same time code. I found out that the most reliable way is to capture to an internal IDE disk that is not the system disk. But this is not the topic of my email.

[dubaifox]

Did you make the quicktime on your computer, or was it made on a different computer that had a different CPU speed than the one you are using.

Just wondering, because someone at a technology seminar was saying drift is likely to happen if you make a quicktime on a different machine than the one you will be playing back on.

Was wondering if it was true.

[O.G. Killa]

I just had a post class at a school here in LA. We had the same problem after a while the video would not sync to the audio. It was actually the video card in the computer that was causing the drift and the school had to swap out the video card with a different make/model to get it to work. Not sure if this was the same problem you're having, but it might be.

I would contact Digi Support about this to see if it is your video card, Quicktime version, or maybe some other problem in your system.

[Infa]

Hey,, used to have the same problem. There is several articles on this. I have a soulution, and it is none of the above.

Take your QuickTime movie and "Extract" the audio track(soundtrack) to a separate file (a movie with no movie, just sound). Then go to the original movie (that you just extracted from) and now "DELETE" the "soundtrack" (audio part of the movie).
Now go back to the soundtrack only file and "select ALL" and "copy" (so you are "copying" the whole entire soundtrack from beggining to end)... THEN go to the original movie file (now with no sound to it because you deleted it) and here is where you have to do some experimenting because I forget the exact one you do, BUT there are a few choices on how to "paste" it back, there is "ADD" , "ADD SCALED", "PASTE", etc... and a couple others. I KNOW it is not "paste", and I am pretty sure it is "add scaled" , but try them all until it works. Basically add the extracted soundtrack back to the original movie.... It works for me EVERYTIME, and I have had some 2 hour movies.

Then obviously, if you are doing the soundtrack in Pro Tools, just bounce the soundtrack as a SEPERATE stereo quicktime audio file, then use that to follow the steps above (that work the best) ...

And of coarse NONE of this will work if your sound was drifting from IMPORT or something else, and it is actaully IN THE CLIP itself.. Then you have to definetely go in ProTools and fix the drift, THEN follow the steps above...

The way to keep away from IMPORTING the drift from your DV is (depending on your software) select "limit capture time" to anything under 10-17 minutes. Then you'll have alot of clips you just piece back together with your movie program (Final Cut Pro, etc..) ........


--Hope This Helps--

[Infa]

Oh,,, I'm sorry, ONE MORE THING ---

You need QuickTime Pro to do what I described above.

So are you using QuickTime Pro ??

Make Sure You Are ---

[Fokke van Saane]

Did you make the quicktime on your computer, or was it made on a different computer that had a different CPU speed than the one you are using.

Just wondering, because someone at a technology seminar was saying drift is likely to happen if you make a quicktime on a different machine than the one you will be playing back on.

Was wondering if it was true.

Well, i have to check that. In the case of the project yesterday, where i again noticed this drift, yes, it was captured on a dual800, and transferred to my dual 1.25.
But i am sure it happened on projects too that where captured on the same puter that was used for playback. I will investigate this, since i want to make sure there is a difference or not.

Do you remember who said that about the drift on the seminar? I'd like to contact him about it.

Fokke van Saane

[Fokke van Saane]

Hey,, used to have the same problem. There is several articles on this. I have a soulution, and it is none of the above.

Take your QuickTime movie and "Extract" the audio track(soundtrack) to a separate file (a movie with no movie, just sound). Then go to the original movie (that you just extracted from) and now "DELETE" the "soundtrack" (audio part of the movie).
Now go back to the soundtrack only file and "select ALL" and "copy" (so you are "copying" the whole entire soundtrack from beggining to end)... THEN go to the original movie file (now with no sound to it because you deleted it) and here is where you have to do some experimenting because I forget the exact one you do, BUT there are a few choices on how to "paste" it back, there is "ADD" , "ADD SCALED", "PASTE", etc... and a couple others. I KNOW it is not "paste", and I am pretty sure it is "add scaled" , but try them all until it works. Basically add the extracted soundtrack back to the original movie.... It works for me EVERYTIME, and I have had some 2 hour movies.

Then obviously, if you are doing the soundtrack in Pro Tools, just bounce the soundtrack as a SEPERATE stereo quicktime audio file, then use that to follow the steps above (that work the best) ...

And of coarse NONE of this will work if your sound was drifting from IMPORT or something else, and it is actaully IN THE CLIP itself.. Then you have to definetely go in ProTools and fix the drift, THEN follow the steps above...

The way to keep away from IMPORTING the drift from your DV is (depending on your software) select "limit capture time" to anything under 10-17 minutes. Then you'll have alot of clips you just piece back together with your movie program (Final Cut Pro, etc..) ........

--Hope This Helps--

Interesting.
I captured the movie with both audio and video. The audio was used as a guide track only since the audio comes via OMF. So, if i understand you correctly, if i capture my movie without sound, just video, i might solve the problem too. Or, like you say, delete the soundtrack from the QT movie. I will do some experiments with it.
Thanx,
again; interesting!