Well the subject header says most of it. I'm capturing small 240 X 160 videos at 30fps. When I play them in Quicktime they play full speed at 30 fps. When I bring them to Final Cut Pro they'll play at full speed in the source window but when I get item properties for them it says that they're 10fps which means that when I put them into a squence it needs me to render before playing since sequences can't be set to 10 fps. After rendering it plays at a nice smooth framerate so it's obviously not really 10fps.

Has anyone else run into this problem or have ideas about what needs to be done to fix this?

Hello-
This has been covered pretty extensively in this forum.

Here is correspondence from the developer:

When you set SP X to 25 fps, it does everything it can to capture at that exact frame rate given the machine's processor power. Sometimes it can, however sometimes it can't - that's the nature of a multitasking operating system.

The frame rate being reported in QT is the exact framerate that movie was captured at (it should be basically the same displayed in SP X's Save Movie dialog's Movie Info panel).

However, that means that the *duration* of each frame is not exact from frame to frame. Most programs don't have a problem with that, QuickTime for example, FCP does.

Here's the official response from Apple:

"We determine the frame rate of a QT movie by examining the sample durations in the video track (if one exists). We do not simply divide the duration by the sample count, as this yields inaccurate results for movies that may have long frames, dropped frames, or having edits applied by the user or another application (e.g. only a portion of the video media is referenced by it's associated video track).

First thing FCP checks is the timescale. At present, FCP uses the following timescales on a normal basis: 600, 2400, 2500, 2997, 5994, 6000. The timescale doesn't determine the rate by itself, but provides data for other checks.

Next, we correlate the start and end of the track, with the media itself. (TrackTimeToMediaTime) This gets us the range of sample to examine further.

Next, we get the duration of the first, second, and last samples. The second sample is compared against the first and last samples, to see if the durations are consistent. The QT sequencegrabber has a habit of making the first and last samples longer or shorter in duration than one would normally expect. By comparing the second sample to the first and last, we see if we should ignore the first/last, or include them.

Once we've confirmed if we're including the first/last samples in our check, we get the time delta between the start/end of the last and first samples (as appropriate). Dividing this by the expected sample duration (second sample duration), allows us to check if the total length is an integral of the expected duration.

After all this, we have a timescale, and a normalized sample duration, which we then lookup in a table, or divide out to find the frame rate. Some of the more common combinations are: 100/2997, 1/25, 24/600, 125/2997, etc...

FCP does not support variable length samples in movies. We're expecting all of the samples to be the same duration in a movie, or at least of an integral duration. If you're generating a movie that is not NTSC rate based, then use a timescale of 600, dividing this by your frame rate to get the sample duration. If you're using one of the 3 NTSC rate combinations we support (23,98, 29,97, 59,94), then use a timescale of 2997 or 5994, and the appropriate sample duration (125 or 100)."

Here are the workarounds I've been able to find:

This is what I found using trial and error in FCP - I'm just not terribly familiar with it.
Select your clip, then go to the File menu to Export -> QuickTime movie...Choose Custom in the Setting popup menu. Under the General tab in the Sequence Preset Editor, set the Editing Timebase to the framerate required for your movie - generally 29.97 in FCP.

Click OK, then Save. Your movie will be exported as a .mov file at 29.97 fps. Then reimport the movie using the File->Import option.

This was sent to the Snapz Pro X beta list:
Open the Clip in Cinema Tools and conform the frame rate to the frame rate you used to export from SnapZ Pro. Then import to Final Cut Pro and FCP will see the frame rate correctly.

Match other settings (size and codec) and you'll have real time playback in FCP timelines without rendering (well I did with PhotoJPEG and a 1280 x 720 timeline).

This was posted in our webboard here:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=107999
Import your SPro vid into FCP (into the browser), select it and right click (control click) and choose "Make Multiclip sequence". THis produces an extra sequence in the browser (along with one or two other things). Double click the "multiclip sequence" in the browser and.... the video clip opens in the time line. No rendering is needed (oh maybe for the audio...) and if you check sequence settings you will see that the frame rate shown is exactly the same as the rate you captured at, be it among the "movie" fps or lower, e.g. I've only tried it at 10 fps.

and this article was sent to us by the author:
http://rentzsch.com/notes/screencastingWit...oAndFinalCutPro

I tried the re-exporting but it stayed at 10fps. But using the Cinema Tools conform tool it worked like a charm and only took a second. Thanks!

Hello-
Right on - glad to hear it!

How does using the Cinema Tools tip help in editing the movie in FCP besides it begins showing the correct number of FPS?

Hello Rafael,
The post you are referring to is over a year old. There's now an option to force the framerate so Final Cut Pro will see it properly. Please see the FAQ. Hope this helps

Thank you, I'll try that out.

Hi,

We've been experiencing the same problem. All our DV clips captured via snapz playback fine in QT, but show up as 10fps or sometimes 14fps in Final Cut Pro,... I activated the "enforce framerate" via terminal, but I am still having the same problem (I opened up the preference file to ensure that the feature was on, and it was). Am I missing something?

We recently upgraded to a Mac Pro 4-core leopard 10.5.5, with Final Cut 6.0.4 setup, from Tiger PowerPPCs running FCP 5, and that's when this all began. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this workflow work?

Thanks,
Rob

Hello Rob,
Your best bet is to not use the enforce framerate option, but recompress your Snapz footage to normalize the framerate and then import it into Final Cut Pro. You should also take a look at this workflow. Best of luck to you