Dealing with Dropped Frames in Final Cut Pro

[ This article was first published in the February, 2010, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]

Rick White asks:

I am experiencing a problem in Final Cut 6.0. I have 130 pictures in a sequence with a music track and some sound effects to create a slide show. During playback I am getting a dropped frames notification. I have two hard drives. The pictures are in the My Pictures folder on the boot drive. I do not have any captured video so all the assets are on the boot drive. The interesting thing is I only started experiencing the problem after I added some sound effects from Soundtrack Pro. Each of the pictures are jpeg and 2300 x 1700.

Larry replies: Rick, thanks for writing.

The key issue is not where your pictures are stored, but where your render files are stored. This is a symptom of a hard disk that’s too slow. Make SURE all scratch disks are set to an external drive.

Also, the video format you use for your sequence will have an affect as well. Here’s an article that explains video formats in more detail.

Understanding Video Data Rates