FCPX Has Bad Audio

[Gregor Queck]

Did you apply audio plugins?

. . .

[Ken Bennett]

I have no audio plugins at this time. Original footage was shot in HDV and ran through EditReady what makes a MOV file. This MOV’s audio plays fine by itself. But from within FCPX I get these “skips” in the audio. I can them “skips” as that someone else had this problem and the audio example was the same. I’m not sure what I selected for audio transcoding in EditReady.

Also told FCPX doesn’t like MP3s and prefers WAV or AIFF files.

Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures!

[Gregor Queck]

FCPX works fine with HDV. I would guess EditReady fusses with the audio track. Just try the original HDV files…

. . .

[Nick Toth]

I use MP3’s in FCPX all the time with no issues. Your problem is probably with the format your HDV was converted to.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would guess there’s a frame rate problem somewhere.

[Bill Davis]

What Jeremy Said.

“skips” in audio are usually a sign that the audio sample rate or codec settings on your original capture device were not at one of the more popular standards. Usually, X will auto-conform the audio to the correct sample rate and transcode on the fly – but there are some types of less common audio encodings it’s simply not able to parse.

Drop your original clips into something like MediaInfo – which will tell you the sample rate and codec involved. If it’s too weird – you might have to export your audio – conform it to a better standard – and re-import and re-connect it in X.

There are a LOT of capture “standards” out there. No program can handle them all flawlessly.

Good luck.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Ken Bennett]

EditReady has a few audio transcode options (Passthrough or change nothing, Uncompressed PCM and 2 AAC options). I guess I can test each one out and see if the problem lies in there.

THX

Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures!

[Dave Jenkins]

Before you try that maybe you should bring the HDV footage into FCPx first and see how it plays. I used NTSC, PAL, multiple sizes and frame rates all in the same timeline and when render everything played fine.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
Mac Pro 3.5MHz 6-Core Late 2013
FCP X

[Gerry Fraiberg]

I have never had a problem with HDV audio imported directly from a Sony Z5 to FCPX, from day one when the software was released.

[Scott Houston]

I know this is an older thread, but in case anyone drops by like I did, I have identified the issue…

FCPX seems to have issues with AAC audio in an imported file coming in. My situation involved captures from an ATEM TV Studio that saved h.264 files with AAC audio (no other choices). Even though FCPX is transcoding (optimizing) upon import, something happens and introduces those snaps and pops. The files are fine playing in QT Player out of FCPX, it is only once imported that the snap, crackle and pops are introduced (and they will stay in any export formats.)

I did a bunch of testing and clearly the issue is FCPX not handling the AAC audio correctly and introducing digital noise.

The (somewhat kludgy) workaround I am using to solve it is to drop the h.264 files into Compressor and extract the audio into a separate AIFF file (there is a pre-existing setting under the Audio Formats folder). Then once the h.264 file is in a timeline, I split the audio from the video (expand audio components), delete it, then drag in and snap the .aiff file created in compressor directly below (to keep sync easily) and then turn the vid and the new audio into a new multi-clip so I can edit them together moving forward.

The other simpler option that worked (if space and overhead is no issue to you) was to render the h.264 in Compressor to ProRes. That then changed the audio format and those imported files worked as well. However the ProRes converted files were easily10X larger than the original h.264 + the new .aiff file.

The thing that made absolutely no sense to me however is that if you have FCPX create optimized media upon import (like I do…) it supposedly creates ProRes 422 files. But those automatically optimized in FCPX have the noise, but the ProRes 422 files created first in Compressor, then imported do not. Who knows …