BUG: Clips in timeline slip 5 frames for no reason – REALLY FRUSTRATING

[Jeremy Garchow]

No, it’s supposedly already “optimized”.

My guess is that there’s something weird with the fcp7 captures that X doesn’t like. The math is completely different.

In your screen grab with the gap clips, it seems to be very regular, which seems buggy.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much HDV experience in either app, hopefully someone else can chime in.

I have used many multiclips and haven’t seen anything slip like that.

Be sure to file a bug with Apple.

I wonder if you remade the edit with ProRes transcodes if things would be better, but that’s a lot of work since X is terrible at reconnecting to different versions of the same source.

[Bill Davis]

And just for grins… go back to the original FCP-7 files and take a hard look at the AUDIO components.

Back when I was editing on 7 for all those years, one constant source of offset problems that resemble you’re in my clips was having the video locked to one time base – but having the audio set at different sampling rates.

If the software is transcoding to even FRAMES – but there’s audio samples “hanging over” – then the software could easily think it needs to add a visual “frame” of nothing to allow the audio sample frequency to complete it’s calculations of a full sample.

My overall advice is that if you must start out working with serious transcoding of long-GOP style predictive frame content – you’re GOING to have problems downstream unless you carefully transcode EVERYTHING into a full frame format that newer editing software can dependably work with.

And “capturing” via FCP-7 – which is Quicktime-based rather than AV Foundation and Core Video based is a very poor way to start any edit that’s destined to be done in X.

Put simply, you need to get OUT of the decade and a half year old imprecise world of legacy technology and get your work into a modern data stream as soon as you can.

And working in FCP-Legacy is NOT a good way to do this. Apple jettisoned all that underlying technology for a reason.

FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Eddie Adams]

Replacing all my clips with transcoded versions within the “Events” folder fixed the issue and gave me no problems with the reconnect (as long as the framerate and size matches its usually all good). Interestingly enough, I now have to slip everything BACK 15 frames to make it right again, since the ProRes fixed the issue. I would say this definitely is an issue relating to long-gop edits, so moving forward I will just transcode to ProRes before importing into FCPX.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I know you said there’s a bug with FCPX HDV captures, but I’d be curious if that fixed it as well, or maybe FCPX captures HDV as ProRes anyway? I don’t know. I know you could do this with FCP7 (HDV as ProRes).

Thanks for posting back.

[Eddie Adams]

Hi Bill, audio sample rates were all constant at 48khz, but I’m familiar with the issue you’re mentioning. I would love to ditch FCP7 completely, but unfortunately as discussed earlier, FCPX has a serious bug which makes capturing HDV tapes difficult. For now I will simply transcode to ProRes and keep my fingers crossed – any more issues though and I’m likely jumping back to Premiere.