• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Batch Processing in Soundtrack breaks clips

  Posted by Gaberussell on March 29, 2007 at 3:44 pm

  Hi guys,

  I’m cross posting this from the Soundtrack forum since this involves batch processing video clips from Final Cut Pro, and I figured some FCPers would have insight on the issue.

  I saved out a batch script in Soundtrack Pro that applies a limiter, compression, and normalization. I’ve captured a bunch of tapes ranging from 10 minutes to 3 hours into Final Cut Pro and have had varying luck in processing them.

  When I right click on a selection of about 20 of these clips and click Send To -> Soundtrack Pro Script -> [My Script], Soudtrack processes some of the clips without a problem, but some of them add an “Insert Silence” action before the scripted actions, leaving me with a clip with no audio.

  When I drag and drop the clips onto the script with FCP closed, I get a similar result, and the broken clips seem to “forget” where their media are and only have the one track that Soundtrack has written. When I open the clip in Quicktime and look at the Resources for the other tracks, it lists a bunch of “Unknown File” entries where the media should be (the files ending in -av1, -av2, etc). So Soundtrack seems to be breaking these reference files.

  The only issue I can think of is that some of the media is digitized on other machines in our office and copied over to the machine I’m working on. One machine (a MacBook) is running the same version of Final Cut and Soundtrack as the one I’m working on (the latest), and one is running 5.0 as it’s a G4 machine. However, a lot of the problematic clips have been coming from the MacBook, which is surprising.

  Any ideas on why Soundtrack is ruining my clips?

  Gaberussell replied 19 years, 1 month ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Gaberussell

  April 3, 2007 at 8:19 pm

  I’ve found an answer or at least a workaround to my own problem. It seems that Soundtrack doesn’t like to open raw media from Final Cut. It worked somewhat better when I exported clips from Final Cut Pro, but that was a big time delay.

  The solution I’ve found is to open each file (the first in the sequence of chunks of a captured clip), and do File -> Save As… and save a reference file. Then I batch processed all the reference files and it seemed to work.

  Now if only there were a way to batch create reference files…

  -Gabe

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