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Clip I was editing with has suddenly lost its codec
So there I am happily editing away with a DV-PAL source clip, and suddenly I can’t write video into the sequence any more. I can play the clip in the Viewer, mark in and out points and all the rest, but when I try and write it into the sequence I just get nothing in the video track. The audio writes across fine, but it’s as if I was doing an audio-only edit, the video track remains empty.
I trashed the prefs and rebooted, but no change. Then I looked at the clip properties in the bin, and in the “codec” column it said “None”. There appears to be no way to change it back to “DV-PAL”. In about 6 years of using FCP I’ve never seen that before.
I did a Get Info on the clip (which is a standard QT), and it reported it as a completely normal DV-PAL file. Same when I loaded it into QT Player and then called up the Inspector. I duplicated the source clip, renamed it and re-imported it into FCP, and it was fine – the codec was reported as “DV-PAL” and I could edit as normal, but if I tried re-importing the original clip, it still said that it had no codec.
Very weird. Can anyone cast any light on this?
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5 Replies
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My guess (and it’s only a guess) that a bit has been flipped in the original qt file and it’s damaged. When you used QuickTime pro and made a copy? It rewrote the header correctly which is why you can use it.
Best,
Jeff I. Greenberg
Author/Master Instructor/Speaker/Consulting
My contact info and more -
Perhaps I’m suggesting the obvious here, but I have to be sure…
You do have your track destination set correctly don’t you?
Alex Elkins
@postbluetv
http://www.postblue.tv
View my new colour correction reel -
It’s *not* a track destination issue 🙂
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Possible, I guess. But why did only FCP stop recognising it as a DV file, and why did it happen mid-edit? QT Player, MPEG Streamclip and VLC all still played the clip normally, and all reported it as a standard DV-PAL file.
It’s probably just one of those things, and it’ll never happen again.
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[Gareth Randall] “It’s *not* a track destination issue :)”
Had to be sure!
I know you said that a duplicate of the file imports correctly. Have you tried duplicating the file and then re-connecting to it (as opposed to re-importing it and manually repeating all of the cuts you’d done with that clip)?
Another thing to try would be to use FCP’s built-in ‘Make Offline’ feature? I’d use that to disconnect from the problem file, save, close and re-open the project, then manually re-connect to the same file. It might force FCP to kind of ‘refresh’ it’s interpretation of that file.
It’s certainly an odd situation that I’ve never encountered before.
Alex Elkins
@postbluetv
http://www.postblue.tv
View my new colour correction reel
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