Clips coming over as black on timeline

[Matt Surf]

No, it was original footage off my EOS 550D and audio off my Zoom and then I synced using FCPX sync capability. Thanks.

[Matt Surf]

Hi Jeremy, apologies about the delayed response, been offline!! The footage wasn’t synced, it came in straight off the card and then I synced it with my Zoom captured audio using FCP X’s sync option. Thanks.

[Elias Huch]

OK, So I am in the same boat, sort of. My event got corrupted, so I deleted it and created a new one. All was fine and good. Reconnected and everything came back online. However, SOME of my clips are black, the waveform is still there, but no video or sound. If I open it in the timeline it works fine. Any ideas?

Elias Huch
Motion Graphics Designer
Reelvizion Productions

[Matt Surf]

Hi Elias,

Off memory, I think I cleaned out my permissions, restarted and it was all OK again – a glitch!!

Good luck

Matt

[Mark Zamora]

Thank you, this fixed the problem. Mark

[Mark Dixon]

I’m able to regularly reproduce this behavior by exporting a particular FCP7 project to XML, then converting to FCPX with 7toX, then opening in FCPX. Not only do I get strange black frames (sometimes entire black clips) when skimming around the clips, but the behavior leaks into all of my other open libraries from other projects that previously had no problem. All libraries are negatively affected by this behavior until I remove the problematic library that contains the clips imported from FCP7 and restart FCPX. Then all the libraries that had previously received the “leaked” bad behavior are fixed. If I re-open the problematic library, however, then all the other open libraries get re-infected with the strange behavior.

A few additional considerations to help us debug this thing:
– I tried resetting preferences and that didn’t help.
– The footage appears to be fine in FCP7 (HDV 1080p30 – actually 29.97fps – 1440×1080 – shot on Canon XH-A1)
– If I import the raw footage from problematic FCP7 project WITHOUT doing any XML/7toX conversion (i.e. ID the video files from that project and import them separately, unassociated with the FCP7 project file/sequences/bins) the footage shows up fine in FCPX. Something is getting gummed up in the conversion.
– I have successfully converted many other projects from FCP7 to FCPX using 7toX without this problem, even though the same camera and workflow as the problematic project were used.
– I tried re-linking the problematic files and that didn’t help.
– Some of the problematic files show up in FCPX with a compound clip icon instead of the expected thumbnails.
– I wonder if there was a frame rate mismatch somewhere that FCP7 deals with more gracefully with than FCPX?

I’d love to be able to import this problematic project and get working on it in FCPX instead of FCP7. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

***
Independent Filmmaker
Canon C100, Panasonic GH3
FCPX, FCP7

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would email Intelligent assistance and send a copy of both the original XML and translated fcpxml.

info at AssistedEditing dot com

[Charles Fredricks]

Related to “Clips coming over as black in timeline”, FCP 7: just had this problem. Simple fix worked for me:
Go to ‘View” drop down menu. Under ‘Image — Image and wireframe — Wireframe’ options, make sure you don’t just have ‘Wireframe’ checked. Not sure how that happened, maybe some keystroke combination I’m unaware of. Anyway, checked ‘image’ and all was back to normal.
I knew it had to be something like this because these are the same clips I’ve been using for months, and they play uncorrupted in Quicktime.

[Keith Hardy]

The same thing got me sweating. As I think you’ve realised, you must have inadvertently hit ‘w’ (for wireframe) and hitting it again will toggle it between 3 view states. Just wanted to add this comment for completeness. apologies for any duplication.

[Lana Westbrook]

Hi Matt! Did you ever find out exactly what is causing this? I could’t tell from the responses.

I am having the same problem. I use multicam and I am doing some color corrections and editing to the footage after I have made it a multicam. I have never had this happen before and I do this type of editing all the time.

And I actually have a section of the video that is black and it either re-renders over and over again (with no change to the video) or the orange line just sits above the footage and the footage remains black. My audio is there as well.

Any help would be great! Thanks so much!