FCP7 Audio Madness

[Jeremy Garchow]

Quit FCP, Trash your preference and trash your audio render files.

Jeremy

[Edward Kulzer]

Prefs have been trashed several times; the cache folder and plist removed and trash emptied & comp. restart each time. We even booted in Safe Mode and Verified/Repaired all HDs; and later used FCS Remover & remove the entire FinalCut Suite and did a fresh install. Still, Stereo Linking on A1&2 of any given clip sometimes results in some OTHER audio clip’s layer elsewhere in the timeline being linked up to the pair.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Did you trash the audio render files?
Was the audio captured from tape?

[Edward Kulzer]

Renders were trashed; Audio was captured intrinsic to the video clips— Here’s an example: clips A, B, C, and D are laying consecutively in the timeline. Somebody said something naughty in clip A, so “tone” from bars and tone, is inlaid in within the cut of clip A’s audio to bleep out the cursing. The four clips have 4 tracks of audio from the camera laying on tracks A 1-4, 1 and 2 being separate mikes, 3 and 4 being garbage mikes. All four clips’ audio tracks were pain-stakingly stereo paired by the process of: duplicating audio track one (lav mike) onto/over audio track 2 (boom mike), A1 panned to -1, its dupe on A2 panned to +1, Stereo pair the A1&2. Now, this is a half hour show, so it’s more complicated, but you get the picture. This recurrent glitch results in a couple different things: let’s say I Quadruple-T to “select all forward” at the Clip C mark, intending to JUST move clips C & D. Somehow, Track 2 of Clip A (half of it’s Stereo paired audio on 1 & 2)— far previous in the timeline— —OR—— the 3 frame audio cross-fade from A’s tail to B’s head is somehow selected as well. And the graphic icon on the audio tracks of Clip C denoting that it’s a Stereo Pair (dual-facing triangles) is messed up so that only one of the halves of the icon is present on its tracks. I cannot move Clip C & D, because of the errantly selected audio that for some godforsaken reason FCP believes to be Stereo Paired to Clip A (when C&D are selected, that errant clip or transition gets selected, too; and all attempts to move result in “conflict on track x; cannot move”). Trashing prefs and renders did not solve it.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks for this. Sometimes, when you link clips together or cut a clip separately from it’s audio, the video is linked to the audio down the timeline. You would then have to unlink (shift-l) then select the audio directly below it and relink ( shift-l). If you didn’t unlink first, you might have some odd combinations.

[Edward Kulzer]

Oh, certainly— but why in heck would the audio tracks from a completely separate clip get linked to it, e.g. only one track, track 2 of “tone” from bars and tone suddenly linking to a clip of video 30 seconds later in the timeline? The Linked Selection (shift-L) I keep off, and typically just use Option when I need to link them… but this craziness where FCP associates completely separate clips’ audio to a different clip, and messes up Stereo-Pairing— is throwing our post-production way out of whack. I’m tempted to just let the mixer deal with it, but we need to get tapes of the Roughs and Fines out to the EPs at the station for review, and can’t expect them to just “look past” all of a sudden audio just blaring out of only the left or right speaker, intermittently. FCP is undoing the Stereo-Pairing at random— even on imported music tracks that ARE ONLY stereo-paired L/R.

[Edward Kulzer]

It has now one-upped itself; just “drew in” audio waveform in all the empty-track spaces for about 5 minutes of the show (that which would be slug if it had content, in between about a hundred edits). This “new phantom audio” is un-selectable, disappearing if you try to select the space, only to re-appear if you de-select. Then it crashed FCP. I am positively loving this.

[Jeremy Garchow]

This sounds line a serious problem. You’ve trashed all your waveform caches I take it? What’s your storage situation?

[Edward Kulzer]

Storage? Over 400 GB each on 2 FW drives, & separately, 18GB of RAM; we’re not running SATA or SAS, but FW 800’s been doing us fine with all the XDCAM footage preparatorily saved out as ProRes LTs.

[Matt Lyon]

Maybe you’ve already tried this, but what about doing the following:

-make a new sequence, with settings that match the problem sequence
-select all the clips in your problem timeline, then copy and paste them into your new timeline.

Sometimes I find a sequence gets corrupt and doing the above wipes the slate clean, so to speak. Might not help in your situation, but it’s worked for me in the past when there seem to be gremlins creeping into the timeline.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto