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General Errors, Spinning Ball of Doom & More!
I am working on a realtiy show that was digitized using the Offline RT NTSC codec. As you would expect there is a ton of footage that we are sharing across a Fibre Channel network. We have run into a few issues that I cannot seem to get a fix for so I look to the pasture for my answers.
Here’s the specs for the systems as best I can figure. (I didn’t install nor do I have much knowledge of exactly how our Fibre SAN is hooked up or configured.)
OSX 10.4.9
Dual 2.66 Dual Core Intel
2 GB RAM
AJA Kona Lhe cards
Apple XRAID w/approved Fibre Channel cardsAnd now the issues:
1. We have been trying to export cuts for DVD screenings and have run into more General Errors than I have ever seen. We have tried multiple flavors of output: Quicktime, QT Conversion, Compressor. All of them Fail or give General Errors (of course, no error number!). I have tried nesting, blowing renders away, refresing prefs & basically every other trick I have learned over the years but to no avail. The only way the assistants have been able to get around this is to “locate” the error – tweak the shot by a small amount and re-output. At best this has been an “iffy” workaround and under deadlines it is a delivery killer.
2. On these systems I get the spinning beach ball more than ever. I am used to it when coming out of sleep or perhaps when a large project loads but man it happens on match frames, loading footage or music into the viewer, tabbing between applications. If it was occasional I wouldn’t mind but I feel like it’s happening way more than it should. My guess is that is the shared storage speed but I’ve been on other systems that are much zippier and those were on older Macs!
3. Here’s a weird one. Two channels of audio that was digitized stereo even though they are mono tracks. No problem, unlink them and pan them center, great! Now I want to drop the levels on CH2 but keep CH1 up. Mysteriously my audio cannot be heard at all. Try the reverse and the same thing happens…no audio coming from the speakers. Okay, try deleting the track I don’t want. It works! This workaround sucks because I lose the other audio that I may want to keep for final mix, background noise, etc. Using keyframes doesn’t help either, even if I keyframe only one channel the “sister” channel pots down or up with it even though there are no keyframes visible in the timeline.
Is there a ghost in the machine or what?
Mucho thanks in advance and “free grazing” to anyone that helps!
Bob
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2 Replies
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Regarding the general errors, are these by any chance multiclips? I was just working on some sequences today in the Offline RT format that were multiclips and was having the same ‘general error’ when I would go a quicktime export. After a little trial and error, I found that the only way that I could get it to work was by collapsing all the multiclips in the sequence and then doing the export.
I also had a multiclip sequence spontaniously change the clips that were part of the multiclip and the timecode that had been edited into the sequence. When I was scrolling through the sequence that had been completed in FCP 5.1.4, I realized that a bunch of shots were of completely different footage than they should be and other shots had moved the edit points, so that sound was now out of sync with picture, etc. I reopened the original FCP 5.1.4 project and looked at the original sequence and everything was fine, so I copied that sequence into my FCP 6 project and replaced the corrupt sequence.
That’s why I cloned my FCP 5.1.4 drive, so I could deal with these problems as they come up in FCP 6. Looking forward to the .01 release although FCP 6 is remarkably stable for me, hardly ever crashes.
Hope that helps,
Santiago -
That may actually help. We do use multiclips and that is something I haven’t tried. Thanks and any other suggestions would be appreciated.
Bob
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