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Adventures in Stupidity
I thought you all might find this amusing. We never admit it can happen to us.
I’m no stranger to FCP and DeckLink. I even occassionally contribute to the Xsan forum. I’ve been around the block with FCP and Decklink since the first revs and cards. But life takes many twists and turns, and for the past year or so I’ve been out of day to day editing, and my G5/DLX setup has gone unused, though I’ve kept the software current. Tiger, 5.0, etc. Aside from moving furniture, the edit setup is untouched.
I get a call from a pal who needs a presentation put together. Sure, I say, c’mon over tomorrow. It’d be fun to edit for a day. Back in the saddle, all that.
Of course, I’m an anal cuss. So this evening I set about doing a full fax of my system — don’t want to look stupid in front of friends. There WAS that furniture move… Anyway, put in the latest DLX driver, spin up FCP. It stalls out. Ah, smart fellow I am, i see that it’s a pesky Ultimatte plugin. Fixed that, FCP boots fine. Gee, why not capture some video from my SP deck? Easy, right? Ha! DeckLink sez “No Video Input.” Huh? Couldn’t be me, no!
Wires are fine, card outputs SDI, other inputs fine, no RGB input or output. Damn. Go behind the rack. Looks fine. Go online looking for similar problems — is it some OS/DL/FCP revision incompatibility I havent kept pace with? Nope. Arg.
Stomp around the house. Damn card. Not FCP cause the BM Deck Control Ap sez the same thing — nice graphic with “No Video” real big. Uh oh. OK. I confess, my system is actually setup with OSX Server. Could that be the problem? No… Server is basically OSX with a couple additions. The OS sees the card just fine, and SDI output from FCP works… Hmmm. That saki over dinner is not helping here.
OK, ok, check the wires. AGAIN. A flashlight might help. And those $19 reading specs. There was that furniture move. Didn’t I re-plug all the cables? Sure! There they are, nice and dusty and tidy. But wait…
In to out out to in, or is that in to in and out to out? Right. Maybe switch ’em.
Bingo. Duh. Pretty pictures at last. Senior moment. Ha!
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12 Replies
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it’s always the last thing you check!
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DOH! I got bit by that bug twice this week.
The new motto around the facility is “check the obvious first”
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…or the thing you should have checked first; a lesson I can’t seem to learn.
Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co. -
Everyone does this – especially me – I have been doing this for almost 25 years, built countless edit systems, and just 2 weeks ago, I plugged in all the inputs to a mixer in the INSERT INPUTS instead of the line inputs, and stood there saying to myself “crap, the damn mixer is dead”. We all do it.
Bob Zelin
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I remember getting L/R swapped for the offline capture, fixing it for the batch recapture forgetting it would screw up all the mixing work that was “backwards”.
One of the “stupidist” things to happen in our shop was a cameraman who accidently shot on the cleaning tape for its full 10 minute length…then the material was key to the story so we had to play the whole tape back in another machine to make a dub. We did it a couple of minutes at a time so the heads didn’t overheat. DVCPro camera and deck still going strong years later. Tough heads, but I was sure they would be damaged after that episode.
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“I plugged in all the inputs to a mixer in the INSERT INPUTS instead of the line inputs”
— Do you have a Mackie mixer by any chance? ’cause I do that every time I switch cabling. Yesterday, case in point. And that’s with another 12 channels into the proper inputs…
Half a bubble off plumb,
Jeff -
funny coincidence there Jeff.
I have to hook up a Mackie mixer this week in our “legacy” video tape dubbing room.
Now lets see if I can do the job right the first time lol.
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Allright I can top your stupid moment with an even stupidier moment. Working along, everything fine, then out of the blue no audio whatsoever. Check all the cable, they look fine, trash prefs, reboot, repair permisions, everything I can think of. Then out of complete desperation I decide to reinstall FCP. 3-4 hours later and still nothing. I’m about to cry when a friend walks in and ask me whats wrong, I explain and he says, “oh, did you check the mute button” It was the mute button.
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Ahh.. the mute button.
This always happens on large SSL consoles. On the “Producer Desk” you have the talkback button that will mute the whole
mixing console. There is always somethin lying around (papers, covers, cables etc.)
This can drive you mad if you dont know it… -
How about playing out a complete 42 minute video to Beta SP 2800 deck, only to find a black tape afterwards – the input selector switch was bumped over from Y,R-Y,B-Y to composite right before the dump.
Or capturing 8 channels of audio from DV with FCP 5’s default settings?
Regards
Francois
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