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Entire Clips Lose Audio via Firewire in FCP4.5?
Setup: Dual G5, FCP HD 4.5, Firewire, Sony Camcorder(s)
For the life of me, I just can’t get to the bottom of this one:When I play back my project through firewire and view it on the camcorder, or print to video, the audio on clips X, Y, and Z is gone.
X, Y, and Z are always the same clips. Meters in FCP look fine during playback. Watching the clip in FCP is fine. Exporting a .mov from FCP, and watching the result in QT Player is fine. All other clips are perfect. It’s only when viewing via firewire + camcorder that the audio on clips X, Y, and Z is gone. I tried it with 3 different Sony camcorders– same result. I tried exporting to .mov, re-importing into a sequence– same result. I tried re-booting, power-cycling, same result.
Cips X, Y, and Z– the clips where the audio disappears– are all of the same interview subjects. All clips panned -1, 1.
Has anyone experienced anything like this? I’m totally desperate for info or ideas!
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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Questions like this are posted very frequently. And many (most?) of the problems are solved by a simple procedure.
There is a function in FCP that is often overlooked… and it can help with many audio and video “skipping”, “sticking” and “missing” problems.
You should “Mixdown” the Audio for playback before you dub out of FCP, or during the edit, if you have audio/video stuttering, drop-outs or freezes.
NOTE: Mixdown has even been demonstrated to help with slipping, skipping problems (or “missing” audio clips) for files being EXPORTED as QT (or similar) files out of FCP.
First, SELECT ALL of your audio tracks (highlight them) on the timeline, then:
Sequence Menu > Render Only > Mixdown.
You should see a dialog box telling you its rendering.
It might seem to make little sense that “Mixing down” even simple audio tracks will “fix” complex video “freezes” or random audio dropouts to tape or export, but it CAN.
NOTE: It does not matter of you only have one audio track, if there are random freezes during output, you should try the Mixdown.
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Thank you for the suggestion! I’ll try that right away.
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GChavez:
Please keep us posted as to your success. I would like to know if this solves your problem
Mike L
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OK, I tried Mixdown on the audio tracks in the sequence, but that didn’t solve the problem. By (a lot of) random experimentation, I did, however, find a fix for this problem. For each clip that was missing sound, I did this:
1) I unselected “Make Stereo Pair” for the clip, creating a two seperate mono tracks– a1 and a2.
2) I deleted a2.
3) With only a1 remaining, I did a mixdown via Render Only>Mixdown
4) I copied track a1 in the clip, and pasted it into a2
5) I selected both a1 and a2, and toggled “Make Stereo Pair”.For whatever reason, this worked. The audio on these clips can now be heard when I play them on my camcorder via firewire.
Now, I’m not sure what combination of these things actually made the audio on these clips play again via firewire. After step #3, I could hear the audio again via firewire and my camcorder. I _also_ – I don’t know if this mattered – muted track a2 before I deleted it. I’m not sure if the mixdown step did anything at all!
This was a devilish problem to troubleshoot, and I hope this info is useful to others who run into it. Please feel free to follow up here if you have questions.
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