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Final Cut Pro Mystery
Alright, I’m going to try and explain this the best I can.
We’re doing a digital delivery that requires a 5.1 mix + a stereo mix. It works out to be 5.1 mix on channels 1-6, stereo mix on 7&8 and again stereo on 9&10. The file is laid out as follows: 5 seconds of slate, 5 seconds of black and then the :15 spot (TRT – :25).
The edit was done in AVID. To create the final file; we export a reference quicktime with the 10 channels of audio out of the AVID. Then we export a video pass to their specs (ProRes 422 23.98). In quicktime pro we marry the two together. Play it, it’s good to go. We import into FCP to check the audio files and just do a second QC. In FCP, all the channels of audio come in, the video looks good… The issue is that the first 10 frames of the spot are missing audio…
The sync isn’t effected, everything after is just fine. What’s crazy though, is that again, the file isn’t missing the audio in quicktime, just FCP.
Here’s our solution (after many tests), if we have our mixer re-export all of the mixes :10 seconds longer (so there is silence filling the :05 slate and :05 black before the spot) the problem goes away. Our conclusion is that if the file doesn’t have audio through out (in the avid) there is a bug that drops out the first part of the spot once imported into FCP.
Has anyone else come across this insane bug? Any other ideas of ways to fix it?
Thanks!
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3 Replies
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The use of QT PRo would be the part that bothered me as copying and pasting different length segments can cause weirdness. Suggestions:
Why not have the audio as stems, and marry audio and conformed video back in FCP?
Or fill the audio gap in Avid before exporting?
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Hey-
Yeah in a perfect world we would have just used the video pass from avid and built them all in FCP. The problem was that there were 21 passes of the spot and we didn’t have time.
And oddly enough filling the audio gap in AVID gave us the same issue… which I really have no explanation for.
Thanks for the response!
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[David Taylor] “The problem was that there were 21 passes of the spot and we didn’t have time. “
Love it.
[David Taylor] “And oddly enough filling the audio gap in AVID gave us the same issue… which I really have no explanation for.”
Me neither. I wonder if you would have filled it with some slight noise (instead of silence) if it would have worked.
I still maintain that QTPro is probably not the best way to go about this.
Instead of using the clunky QTPro, simply take the ProRes file to FCP, add the audio, and export. Or am I missing something crucial to your workflow?
Or, why not simply transcode the Avid Export in Compressor with audio set to passthrough?
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