Ugly Playback in Final Cut Pro

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 Filed in: Weekly Tip

This is one of our favorite gotchas. Recently, a client called us and was extremely frustrated; he was rather worried that somehow his tricked out Final Cut Pro system was possessed and had ruined all of his media. After calming him down a bit, he described the symptoms as really staggered and jumpy playback and it looked like the footage was really low rez even though it was high def.

After a few more questions the fix was clear. In the RT pulldown on the Timeline, settings for Playback Video Quality and Playback Frame Rate were set too low and quarter respectively. No wonder he was getting ugly playback!

If you have similar symptoms, the RT menu is often one of the first places to check. While there are many combinations here, we find that setting both Playback Video Quality and Playback Frame Rate to Dynamic will offer the best balance of real-time playback and quality.

Like this tip? It comes from the book
Final Cut Studio On the Spot from Focal Press.