audio dropouts on Quicktime

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

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.

[Robyn Symon]

Thanks so much!!
I did the mixdown and it worked. No audio dropouts. Should I be doing the export through conversion (batch) rather than the quicktime movie for better quality? If so, how. By the way, I do see blue lines above the time line. Does that mean anything? robyn

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

[symonprod] “I did the mixdown and it worked.”

It usually does the trick. Its just so easy to overlook.

[symonprod] “Should I be doing the export through conversion (batch) rather than the quicktime movie for better quality?”

No reason to do that.

[symonprod] “I do see blue lines above the time line. Does that mean anything?”

Blue lines just indicate that section has been rendered.