HDV transition issues with FCP 5.2

[David Roth weiss]

Have you tried simply trashing preferences?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Berardi]

I have not yet, I will.

Also the FCP version is 5.1.4 not 5.2 – I don’t know why I typed that

[John Berardi]

I have since trashed my preferences – and I have the same problem

Just to make sure I am doing it right – I trashed only the 1 Pref. file in the library for FCP not any of the cache files – should I trash those too ?

[Laurie Thomson]

I’ve just been doing some research on HDV, does this sound like it might be the problem?

As a consequence of the fact that HDV uses the interframe MPEG-2 GOP (group of pictures) structure instead of a solely intraframe compression system, native editing of HDV footage differs technically from the native editing of DV footage. In DV, frame-accurate splicing does not disturb the surrounding video because each frame of the video is stored as a self-contained unit. In HDV, splicing always introduces distortion at the splice points, due to the interdependencies between groups of video frames. Any editing of the video, whether it be a complex transition or a simple scene-change, requires a decompression and recompression of the entire HDV frame group. All modern professional non-linear editing software handles HDV by recompressing only in scenes where absolutely necessary, rather than needlessly recompressing the entire video. This limits degradation to the points of edit.

If HDV footage is converted (known as ‘Transcoding’) to a good intermediate format for editing, these considerations will not necessarily apply, and gradual degradation from generation to generation of edit may be avoided while substantial system performance gains are made. The lossy Apple Intermediate Codec (which runs out of QuickTime) is an efficient, easily usable codec for editing HDV in systems such as Final Cut Pro but lacks the transcoding and generational quality of some third-party HDV Intermediate codecs

I believe there is an apple codec for HDV that you can convert to that might solve your problem. I found this information on Wikipedia.

[David Roth weiss]

No, but you might try deleting the render files uisng the Render Manager, and then re-rendering.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Andrew Kimery]

FCP rescue is a convenient little app to have as it makes trashing FCP prefs as simple as a mouse click.
https://fcprescue.andersholck.com/

It might be a corrupt project, sequence, or piece of media. Try creating a new sequence and see if you get the same result. If yes, the try creating a new project and see if you get the same result. If yes, trying using different media to see if you get the same result. If not, then my guess would be the HDV media is bad. Try recapturing a small chunk of the HDV media and see if it exhibits the bad behavior as well. If so, the the problem could be the tape, the deck/camera used for capture, or the machine used for capture. Which would suck because then you’d need a separate computer and a separate deck/camera to be able to use the process of elimination to finally track down the culprit.

Recently I had some DVCPro HD footage showing similar behavior and I eventually tracked it down to being bad source clips. I don’t know if the problem was from the tape itself or a bad capture though ’cause I was pressed for time so I just made sure I didn’t apply transitions to any of the clips that came from the bad tape.

-A

[Rafael Amador]

If the transitions work well when you export as QT from FC, where is the problem?
You shouldn’t worry about QT Conversion. QT Conversion is not the way to go.
You can try setting in “Render Control” >Codec: Proress.
Your sequence will still be HDV, but the renders are made with this codec. This is a very interesting option only available for HDV and XDCAM footage.

Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.

[John Berardi]

thank you all for the help. Even though I still have the problem.
I trashed render files I trashed pref files and I tried new sequences and new projects.
Still nothing new.
It is possible the capture was bad or the tape was bad but I no longer have the camera to check that.

Since I can export without it being a problem, I have just dealt with the fact I cant see a transition in real time before I export.
The ProRes Codec is just for FCP 6 I believe, or whatever the one that comes with studio 2 is.

So my options are slim – I think the best answer might be to upgrade to the latest FCP. and do the ProRes thing.
However my hard drive has some problems now and I meed to fix that first – but thats a whole other post

[Lauren Nowatka]

Hey John,

Not sure if you’ll see this, but I’m wondering if you ever fixed this problem. I am having the exact same issue and everywhere I look for help on-line, I am not finding anything. I’d love to hear how you solved this one.

Thanks,
Lauren

[John Berardi]

Hey Lauren –
Sorry I haven’t responded right away, if you still haven’t fixed it heres what I know.
I think starting a new project and at least a new sequence and just copying the cut sequence into the new one worked. It didnt work the first time but I did it again.

The real way to fix it is to just upgrade to FCP 6 – they have the ProRes codec and you just don’t get as many problems with the HDV format like that.

But hopefully you found a way – just try all the other things, other people recommended it should work eventually.