Dropping frames in premiere pro

[MahaB82A]

I am unble to understand this concept. What does it mean? What is the purpose of this?  I assume dropping mean elimination of frames but I watched videos showing without seeing the frames it is droppping frames.  

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

"Dropping frames" means your system can't actually reproduce all the frames of that clip in real-time, so it's "dropping frames" ... not showing them ... to try to keep up with playback speed.

At this point, you could go to the playback settings in the lower right corner of the Program monitor, and select say 1/2 or 1/4 resolution, and see if it now can playback without dropping frames.

Or try creating proxies.

Neil

[MahaB82A]

How to know which clip of the frames have been dropped?

[R Neil Haugen]

It will drop frames as your system's resources are overloaded. So it will be different frames intermittently dropped. You can click on the Wrench menu icon in the Program monitor, and select "Show dropped frame indicator" and get a little thing in the lower left that shows red when it's dropping frames.

This is just playback of the image, of course. It isn't "loosing" any frames of the clip, it just can't play them back at the moment in real-time.

Neil

[MahaB82A]

So that which frames have to be dropped is a system's dicision not user's one.

[R Neil Haugen]

It's not a "decision" per se, it's just that it has to 'drop' ... not show ... some frames in struggling to keep the playback going.

Neil

[MahaB82A]

So that if a playback has a struggle to keep and show a frame it will drop that frame. In that case an important frame may be dropped.  

[Peru Bob]

So that if a playback has a struggle to keep and show a frame it will drop that frame. In that case an important frame may be dropped.  

By @MahaB82A

That's why it's important to have properly spec'd and configured system for Premiere Pro and/or use proxies.

[MahaB82A]

Thanks

[daapap]

When you have the indicator switched on and hover over it with the mouse you will see how many frames have been dropped. It makes a big difference whether it's 1 in 10 Minutes or 10 in 1 second 🙂