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Problems working with Merged Clips?
I am cutting a feature film, editing merged clips (video track, 2 or more audio tracks). I’ve been working with Final Cut for so long, that I’ve pretty much gotten used to all of its quirks. However some of them seem so frustrating that I wonder if I’m possibly doing something wrong or if there is a better way to work.
When I load a merged clip into the viewer, I can cut it into the timeline without a problem. But once I start trimming and moving the video and audio around in the timeline, FCP gets wonky with the way it treats those merged clips.
For example, say I have 4 merged audio tracks in the timeline with no corresponding video above it, when I try to match frame on the audio clip, FCP matches the merged clip and opens it in the viewer, but not the correct frame. This is a consistent issue. The correct frame only shows up when I match frame the video clip.
Sometimes I will match frame a merged video clip, and it will open the clip in the viewer, but it will behave as if it’s the master video clip, not the merged clip (even though the viewer is indicating that a merged clip is loaded into it). I first noticed this when I match-framed a merged clip with lots of markers within it into the viewer. I was shocked to see that none of those markers that I had put on the merged clip appeared in the viewer. The only way around this problem was to either re-merge the audio and video into a new merged clip, OR try to match the timecodes between the clip in the timeline and the clip in the viewer that was missing my markers.
Finally, the linking between the audio and video in the timeline is insanely frustrating. As you start moving audio and video around in your timeline, which you will inevitably do when you’re trimming, sometimes video maintains its link to its respective audio track. Other times it doesn’t. There seems to be no pattern to this.
Has anyone else experienced this? I would love to hear your stories of working with merged clips and how you handle it. Thanks.
Uli
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2 Replies
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Why I do not have much experience working with merged clips, I did just do a pretty big multicam with 5 tracks of video and 10 channels of audio. It’s similar to a merged clip, kinda.
I had the exact same problems you are having, and quitting FCP and trashing the waveform and thumbnail caches would fix it for a while. Then after a while it would pop up again. I would then quit and trash those files again. Like you, there seemed to be no pattern to it and it happened rather randomly.
If that’s not working, then try trashing preferences. I had to do that 2 or three times during the course of the edit.
It’s a pain, but it worked. I use preference manager and have a set of preferences that I know work, so I just trashed the prefs with that and restored the working prefs. The waveform and thumbnails I trashed manually.
Jeremy
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yes have all the same problems you do and have trimming problems with mrged clips.. As soon as I go into trim mode with merged clips and try to trim the out going clip jumps to its last frame!!! fin wierd
Drew
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2398405/
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