FCPX 10.2.3 has drop frame exported video

Hai guys,

I'm currently editing a telemovie, the footages are Canon C300 1080i interlace footages.
So after i exported the 1hour24mins telemovie, I realise some parts have this weird drop frames while playing back.
I exported in ProRes 422HQ.

Could it be a Render file thing? Has anybody face this problem before?
Should I delete the render files before I export the telemovie?

This is a known problem with the Canon C300 MPEG-4 AVC 422 codec. When you edit this footage natively you either will see random pixelated frames between cuts, or even worse: you won't see anything on your timeline but pixelated frames will suddenly appear in your exported file. No matter to what format you export. The problem is not consistent, sometimes it will appear and sometimes not. And this does not only happen in FCP X, we have seen the same issues with this footage in any NLE.

Dozens of reports have been sent to Canon, but they have a very bad reputation of not fixing issues with their codecs. So I would not expect a solution from them any time soon. The only workaround is to optimize the footage to ProRes prior to editing. When you optimize the footage first, you won't have this issue.

- Ronny

Thank you so much Ronny! for the past few days I thought it was some sort of plugin issue(as i am using color finale).
How do i fix the problem now is, I got to export the whole teemovie in ProRes, watch the telemovie and pin point the TC of the dropframes.
After watching the telemovie, import the ProRes telemovie into an empty timeline. Back to the original working timeline, find out where the drop frame part is, export that particular clip in ProRes & punch it in into the timeline of the full ProRes telemovie.
It's time consuming, but because the clients doesn't have enough Harddisk space, so this is the only thing i can do instead of Optimizing the media.

Thank you!

Just as a sort of addendum in case anyone else has this problem, I have also had something similar happen with some sony interlaced footage, and was able to fix it by optimizing the media. My wild guess is that it has something to do with messed up i frames, since it only seems to appear when accessing a the middle of a clip, and not when played from the beginning.

Optimizing this footage prior to editing seems indeed the only solution to this problem, until Canon comes up with a fix.

- Ronny