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mini-dv capture now suddenly loses sync, why?
I’ve had two projects (different event videos) where during Capture Now FCP 5.12 suddenly loses all the audio for around 1 sec 13 frames and loses sync (audio around 13 frames later than video both times). The OS is OS 10.4.6 running on Mac Pro.
This time I went back and played my tape in the camcorder it was captured from, and lo and behold, in camera sync is just fine. So its not an error on the tape, at least not one visible in normal playback.
The tape was shot with a Canon GL2 but captured on a Panasonic GS200 camcorder
The tape was shot with no stops or breaks in SP mode
The GL2 had an external mic hooked to the mic-in with mic attenuator on
the mic was on and attenuator was set before rolling
the audio never clipped on tapeI suspect the problem it happens in FCP or between my Mac Pro and and the GS200.
The fcp system is setup for basic firewire and FCP can control the camera if the computer boots with the camera on in VCR mode and hooked up via firewire.
I trashed prefs a few weeks ago and I leave FCP system prefs alone once set since all my projects so far have been mini-DV.
Should I be trashing and resetting my prefs before every new project? Could it be a bad FW port or bad GS200?
If you suspect the gs200, I did capture tapes shot on the gs200 for years on a PC with no such issues.
I don’t want to use my GL2 to capture because I heard it’s too fragile for that. Anyone think the GL2 be okay if every capture was capture now and the tapes were all rewound first?
–Shayne Weyker
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6 Replies
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Check your User Preferences – General Tab… you will see audio synch drift if you have ‘Report dropped frames during playback’ turned off.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, since you did Capture Now did you have ‘Abort Capture on dropped frames’ off? if so you could have captured the clip with dropped frames thus losing synch.
If you had/have both of these settings on and there is still synch probs, then it sounds like you have hard drive problems. What hard drives are you capturing to? Firewire? Have you captured and edited successfully in the past with your current setup? Sounds like a hard drive problem. When was the last time you restarted the machine?
And to answer your question about trashing preferences before each project I would suggest not doing so and only do so when troubleshooting a problem.
Hope this helps
jason -
Capture drive is a raid 0 pair inside the computer (matched hitachi 500GBs)
Abort capture on drapped frames was on.
Report dropped frames on playback was off, but I don’t see why that would affect capture or why it would cause the sudden loss of audio followed by a 13 frame shift.
–Shayne
–Shayne Weyker
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Sometimes camera issues are hard to detect. Some cameras simply don’t like tapes from other cameras for some reason. Probably a difference in heads or something similar. If possible I’d try to load the tape from a professional deck or the original shooting camera.
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By having “report dropped frames” turned off you are in effect telling FCP to play regardless of dropping frames, and unfortunately when it drops frames it often will go out of synch.
How full are your drives?
j -
There is no reason why shouldn’t you use your GL2 for import,
actually it’s advisable as the tape was recorded on that camera (as someone already pointed
out that you might encounter problems by playing tape in different camcorder).
We are using two GL2 cameras for years and we are capturing from them without
problems.
We do use Firestore drives to avoid capture completely, but still 30 % of our
production requires capturing from a tape and GL2.Mick
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The capture drive is around 30-40% full. I got really tired of the “frames were dropped” popups when playing through clips with unrendered effects. So I turned dropped frames warnings off. Why isn’t having “abort capture on in case of dropped frames” on enough to prevent a capture with dropped frames from happening?
And what’s this I hear on the Apple FCP forum about Capture Now being unreliable with TC material? Any one else believe that?
–Shayne Weyker
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