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P2 FCP Weirdness
Hi:
Did a shoot yesterday on my HVX-200. All footage shot at 720 24PN as I usually do. No differing frame rates, nothing unusual. Shoot went great, first high profile client project with the Letus package, footage looked great. I dumped all cards to my MBP and a FW bus powered drive as we were shooting and as I have hundreds of times before. At the end of the shoot, cloned my drive to client’s drive, she took it to her office and was loading the material into FCP 5.1.4.
We shot five P2 cards worth of material. She is able to load all of the material fine into FCP 5.1.4 except for a few clips. Then we enter the Twilight Zone. She is an experienced editor and we just completed another big project on P2 so she knows the workflow.
She is in the P2 import dialogue in FCP and highlights all of the clips and presses the add to queue button. When FCP finished loading the clips, about half of the clips came in successfully, the other half (about five of them) do not come in, they show up in the queue with a red exclamation point on them and the cue status just says, “idle”. She deletes them from the conversion queue and re-loads them. Same result.
She calls me for advice and I bring up my clone of her drive of my G5 here, which I also keep 5.1.4 on just so I have compatability with cient’s like her that are on 5.1.4. I get the same result on my system. Strange, I have never run into this in thousands of P2 cards shot and edited over the past two and half years. We both discover that if we load a single clip at a time into the queue, rather than all of them, sometimes FCP works and brings it in and sometimes it doesn’t. Weird, inconsistent behavior. In going through this trial and error way of loading the clips, she finally gets almost all of the clips captured. All of the clips except two. Both of them show up in the capture window with no TC and duration, they just both say, “spanned”. Very strange, I have never ran into this before either. Fortunately, when loaded into P2 Log Pro, the missing “spanned” clip plays back fine so I export it to an FCP XML/QT and deliver the missing two clips to the her so all is well.
I decide to examine the clips in some other applications so I bring up the clips in P2CMS. All of the clips show up and play fine, so I know that the media is there and is not corrupt. Just for fun, I bring up the clips in P2LogPro. Okay, the first card that had four clips on it with one spanned, it shows up in P2 Log Pro with five clips. It showed up in FCP and P2CMS with four. I check and the clip that said “spanned” ends at 02:37:19:04 and the TC on the next clip that wasn’t there in the other two programs begins at 02:37:19:04. It ends at the same frame as the main clip did in FCP and P2CMS. So overall duration is identical, its just that for some reason, FCP and P2CMS see the clips as incomplete and for some reason, P2 Log Pro sees them as complete and can play them back fine.
Also, just to try something else, I bring up the same drive on my MBP with Final Cut 6.01 and while the same amount of clips shows up (four), the clips that showed up as spanned in FCP 5.1.4 with no TC or duration shows up in FCP 6.01 as “spanned” but it has TC and a duration. Just to check, I capture and transfer it, it plays back fine.
I would really value some input on what the heck is going on here because I am puzzled
Equipment used:
Client’s system – Old G5, not sure of speed but it’s something like a dual 1.8GHz, plenty of RAM, QT 7.3.1, FCP 5.1.4, OS is Tiger, not sure of exact version, but I think it’s something like 10.4My G5 systems – The system that the spanned clips would not load on – Dual 2.3GHz G5, 4GB RAM, FCP 5.1.4, QT 7.2, OS 10.3.9
My MBP – The system that the spanned clips would load on – 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo , 4GB RAM, FCP 6.0.1, QT 7.2 OS 10.4.1
Camera – HVX-200, bought March 2007, has never had any firmware update or anything else, three 8GB P2 cards, one 16GB P2 card. I have shot thousands of P2 cards of material with this setup, have never experienced anything weird like this. That’s what is so strange about this whole experience, all of the gear used is stable, proven and none of it has anything weird with it for any P2 projects.
1. Why would clips no load into FCP in a group but would load in (mostly) one at a time? I usually just highlight all clips, add to queue and they all load. With this shoot, all of that seemed to have changed
2. Usually you can preview the footage on the P2 capture window in 5.1.4 or in the Log and Transfer window in 6.0.1. In 5.1.4, with the media from this shoot (all five cards, even the ones that imported perfectly) all you got was a blank, black screen and in 6.01, you get a gray screen saying, “Playback from this format is not supported”?? Why would that be? I have always been able to see playback from P2 footage in any FCP P2 capture or log and transfer window. Once imported, the clips playback fine in the viewer but not in the capture window.
3. Why would FCP and P2CMS only see four clips where P2 Log Pro would see five? Same overall duration but differing amount of clips.
4. Why would the same P2 card register a clip as “spanned” with no TC and no duration in FCP 5.1.4 but register the same clip as “spanned” but with TC and duration in FCP 6.0.1? As stated, would not import in 5.1.4, imports fine in 6.0.1???
Luckily this shoot went well and with some hard detective work, I was able to bail out the client but I am really concerned that this doesn’t happen again. I know P2, the HVX and FCP pretty well and all of this weirdness has me stumped, I have never seen anything like it. We are on QT 7.2 so I know it’s not the dreaded DRMS issues that have plagued a lot of FCP users recently. We have successfully used all three of these systems with a LOT of P2 recently and we have not changed or updated anything in the chain so I am perplexed as to what the cause is.
Your ideas and suggestions are appreciated.
Dan
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11 Replies
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In FCP 5.1.4 try turning off the ‘remove duplicate frames/advanced pulldown’ checkbox.
Jeremy
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Hi Dan,
I recently experienced similar problems on my HVX200 and P2 workflow. As you mentioned I have used my camera and cards on numerous shoots and this is the first time this has happened. I shot 720P 24P and transferred my media using a Dual Adapter to a Mac Book pro then copied to a G-Raid. At the end of day at location I spot checked my footage using FCP 6’s Log & transfer window. As always I was able to “preview” the scenes without ingesting. When I returned to my hotel and sat down to look at each shot in detail I noticed the “preview” window was greyed out and it said “preview not supported for this format”
I was only able to see the clips if I put them in the queue and captured them. Then they played fine in Final Cut. I also experience the “exclamation marks” you mentioned when I tried to bring all the clips in at once. I had to delete them from the queue and try again one by one to get them in. Never had to do this before. I was very worried that the media had somehow gotten corrupted and I called Panasonic’s tech support for answers. (very hard to get a person on the phone because an answering service picks up and will only take your name and number-frustrating!. When I finally did get someone- they said they had never heard of this issue??? He said I should try several experiments to locate the problem. I tried most of them but the problem continued to appear intermittently. For example I tried reading directly from the P2 card (in the Dual adapter) in FCP’s Log & Transfer window. Some of the clips would play in the preview window while others were once again greyed out.I also downloaded and tried looking at the media in Panasonics P2 Viewer for Mac and they played but only for about 10 seconds then it froze on the last frame but I could still hear the audio and the marker continued to move across the timeline for the duration of the clip.
I have still not gotten a definitive answer to this problem. I was told by Panasonic that it could be any number of things. For example…a defective Dual Adapter, a bad cable, I updated something since the last project I edited and that’s causing the issue. After speaking to the Support guy I was starting to loose faith in P2. He told me these horror stories that people had completely lost file after transferring them! I only have 3 cards so I have to offload and format them. It’s really a scary thought that even after copying them if I format my card I may not have viable media for my client! Unbelievable!
I’m still holding my breath that my client doesn’t call me up and tell me they can’t read the media I just delivered. This shoot just wrapped. On top of all that when I got home I took my copy of the media (on a G-raid) into my Mac Pro and tried looking at it on my edit station. I still had the same greyed out screen with”Preview not supported” but as if things could not get worse after I brought it in to FCP 6 and laid it on a timeline I tried watching the scenes on my Panasonic HD monitor and they were all “crunchy” looking. I freaked out! After settling down and thinking things through I tried looking at a project I still had on my drives that I knew were okay and they played back screwy as well so I know then that the problem was my monitor ( more than likely my AJA Kona card) that was the culprit. Besides the media plays fine on the computers screens.
So in conclusion I am at a total loss to understand this problem and Panasonic’s Techs have been no help either. if ANYONE out there can help me troubleshoot this please write me.
Thanks for your time.
Jim
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Hi Jim:
Unfortunately I have experienced the same FCP issues that you have and I still don’t know why either. The good news is that all of the footage has played back correctly. This is definitely an FCP issue, not a P2 issue. The only advice I have received was “upgrade to FCP 6.0, when I had this problem on 5.1.4. I did upgrade but have still had this happen here and there. I was also told it has something to do with exceeding a certain file size per clip, something like 11 minutes when shooting in 720 24P or four minutes on 1080, but I have had the same ingest issue even with clips smaller than those lengths so I don’t know.
I have just been living with it, it is an inconvenience but oh well.
Dan
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I came across this bulletin when I was troubleshooting the same “idle” problem when importing Panasonic P2. I have FCP running on 5.1 and Snow Leopard.
After troubleshooting to no avail, I decided that the problem was probably FCP 5.1 running on Snow Leopard. I uploaded on someone else’s desktop with FCP 6.0 on Snow Leopard and there were no problems. However, I couldn’t grab the uploaded media and put it in an FCP 5.1 file because 6.0’s formatting didn’t work with 5.1.
In a last case scenario, what I recommend doing once uploaded on another FCP is export using Quicktime Conversion with highest quality render and then importing into 5.1. The footage looks unchanged. It’s a hassle, but because my footage was twenty minutes of an interview, it was an easy sacrifice to make in order to deliver the project on time.
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In a related situation – ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard (using FCP 6.0.6) I’ve had periodic problems with the Viewer turning grey. I can playback clips on the external monitor and in “full screen” mode but the whole window; button, tabs, pulldown menus included are grey.
This happens no matter what kind of media I’m working with from DV to XDCAM.
Initially I had done a clean install of the system thinking it was a conflict between the OS and FCP 6 and that solved the problem for a while and now it’s back.
Any thoughts?
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I have not ran into that because I am avoiding Snow like the plague. I have heard nothing but compatibility issues with it and FCS, Photoshop, etc. all of the programs I use on a daily basis so I am out until Apple has a few more months to implement bug fixes.
Sorry to hear that, hope you can figure it out.
Dan
Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs
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I’ll post if I figure it out…
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So after 1 day of a grey viewer window, the problem has resolved itself (for no apparent reason)…
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and 12 days later… the grey window returns. Weird.
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Is this during lOg and transfer? If so, make sure you no weird characters in your file path name. Keep it to text, numbers and underscores. If you have #$%^* or some other symbol, there’s a chance it might not work.
Jeremy
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