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Compound clip audio weirdness
Someone smack me and tell me what I’m missing here. I have a compound clip nested within my sequence, and the 8 audio tracks are being merged. Usually, expanding audio components shows all the tracks in the compound. And it appears to- I see a whole bunch of tracks. But, for example, A1 and A2 inside the compound have been merged into A1 in the sequence. The rest of the tracks are empty as they should be, so I don’t know how they’re getting merged. I can run this situation over and over and every time the tracks don’t come out merged and I have full access to all the components. X just giving me the finger today? I have two other sequences built the same way and they’re fine.
Here’s the outer sequence and you can see the nested sequence only has audio on A1…
And here’s what that compound looks like when you open it up.
You can see that the particular clip making up the piece of the nest has audio on A1 and A2. Those are the two that end up merged into A1 above. Its’ an actor on on A1, and one on a2 and I can’t have them merged as I need to adjust their levels separately.
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11 Replies
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(Crickets.) Obviously my workflow has so far surpassed others that no one can help me. It’s lonely at the top.
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Bret,
Personally, I’d go back the the original clips – Open in Timeline – and completely delete all those empty tracks.
We’ve seen that when X sees a bunch of empty tracks, (even if you’re not actively using ANY of them) the audio engine sometimes has to look at ALL the nonexistent samples in order to decide whether or not it needs to calculate something.
Empty audio tracks are a HUGE red flag to me.
YMMV.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Thanks Bill. I think you may be right. That’s the only difference I can see between that sequence and the other 3 I’ve done. I used a lot of duplicate shots for mating blue screen stuff out, and each one of those shots had 4-8 tracks from the camera, which, are turned off in the inspector, but they still come across as additional tracks, and when they’re all piled up, I fear that X may get overwhelmed as you suggest.
In my current sequence I’ve done the same with the mattes, BUT, as if reading your mind, I broke apart those duplicate shots and deleted the audio from the sequence. Same thing basically. So far so good. And the nested audio I’m sending through is only a couple tracks now instead of 8-16.
By the time this project is done I’ll have it perfected. Isn’t that how it goes?
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Worked! I went through and opened each track in its timeline and deleted any unused (not actually empty) tracks. Much better than breaking apart audio because doing that also deletes all video fx and transforms from the video!
But I had to go one step further and in the audio inspector I had to choose “reset” on the little audio type pull down. Otherwise it still saw ghost tracks. But doing those two things to every clip in the compound(s) cleared things up and X regained its sanity.
Thanks!
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[Bill Davis] “and completely delete all those empty tracks.”
There are no tracks in FCP X Bill.
😉
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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
Touché
You’re correct.
No tracks…
(Except the ones in Multicam clips and in anything you Open in Timeline and the ones in the precision editor, and…)But all tracks are basically in the mind of the beholder.
Kinda like stereograms –
the picture of the boat is really there – but it often requires learning how to see it.
; )
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Glad it worked. I’ve learned to kill empty multitrack audio right after import so it never infects my storylines. Once bitten, and all.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Bill Davis] “Glad it worked. I’ve learned to kill empty multitrack audio right after import so it never infects my storylines. Once bitten, and all.
“Shouldn’t the “remove silent channels” command do this?
I’ve never been able to make it work!
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Steve,
I *think* that it’s the nature of some digital formats that no matter whether you have the “remove silent channels” choice selected on import, the file that’s imported carries extra audio channels that you simple can’t stop from arriving in X.
I’ve had content files import with 8 tracks of embedded audio – no matter what I did.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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I’m having the exact same issues. And it’s so infrequent that it often drives me crazy. I have to check, double check all synchronised audio during editing: if everything there, is nothing merged, if it is, how can I fix it…
It’s quite the horror show when dealing with a lot of footage.
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