ProRes422 – audio clicks in timelines

[Sean Oneil]

[Bob Cole] “Is this due to not enough room on my 3-drive internal SATA RAID? Is there a way to optimize the RAID?”

RAID-0 and RAID-1 are supposed to be in pairs. Having 3 drives is odd. Maybe that’s related but I doubt it. Trash your preferences before anything else.

[Bob Cole]

Thanks for the suggestions, Sean.

I forgot to mention I trashed prefs. The 3-drive RAID has worked fine before. Did I mention I was using subclips?

Bob

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 10 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Sean Oneil]

Try increasing the number RT audio tracks in you user preferences. This could also be a genlock timing issue. How are you monitoring the audio? Is it looping through a deck? Is the AJA control panel set to freerun?

[David Roth weiss]

[Sean ONeil] “RAID-0 and RAID-1 are supposed to be in pairs.”

Odd numbers for Raid-0 is just fine — Raid-1 must be an even number because the drives are mirrored.

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

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[Bob Cole]

[Sean ONeil] “Try increasing the number RT audio tracks in you user preferences. This could also be a genlock timing issue. How are you monitoring the audio? Is it looping through a deck? Is the AJA control panel set to freerun?”

number of RT audio tracks in user prefs: (I forget – I’d guess 4)
number of audio tracks in timeline: 2
monitoring audio directly from AJA Kona LHe, to powered speakers
AJA Control Panel: freerun

When I double-click the audio to bring it up into the Viewer and play it there, no clicks can be heard.

Another odd thing: When I double-click the video, only the video goes into the Viewer. Same for audio. Yet when I try to link v+a, they show up in the drop-down menu as already linked, and they are not.

I’m in the middle of a major experiment: using iDefrag on the RAID. I’ve never defragged in the year or more that I’ve had this computer.

When the defragging is finished (which may not be for many hours), I’ll try moving the edit point to see whether that gets rid of the clicks.

Thanks for your help, guys.

Bob C

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 10 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Bob Cole]

[Bob Cole] “When the defragging is finished (which may not be for many hours), I’ll try moving the edit point to see whether that gets rid of the clicks.”

Okay. Defragging is complete (ten hours later). Click is still there. But rolling the edit point worked. I know that’s not the solution but perhaps it points to one.

Here’s the structure of the affected area:

Clip A: 4 seconds
Clip B: 20 frames
Clip C: 10 seconds

When I roll the outpoint of the edit between clips B and C forward by 4 or more frames (making Clip B 24 or more frames long), the clip disappears. Rolling by 1, 2, or 3 frames doesn’t work.

Rolling the edit point back (reducing Clip B in size) doesn’t work – click still there, perhaps even louder.

I was originally working with subclips. So I went back to the master clip and re-edited with it. Same exact results.

Any ideas? I’m totally flummoxed. I can edit around this particular problem by rolling the edit 4 frames, but I sure don’t want it rearing its ugly head during a deadline, esp. if a client is saying, “No, I wanted the edit point right THERE.”

The codec is Apple ProRes422, captured via Kona LHe SDI. I wonder whether anybody at Apple monitors this forum, or how I can get the news to them.

My next test is to recapture with ProRes422 and also with something else.

Thanks again!

Bob C

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 10 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Bill Slc]

Hi Bob,
Did you ever solve this problem? I just worked on a show (half hour) in DVCPRO HD 1080i that did almost exactly what yours did. I use a Panasonic DVCPRO HD 1400 to ingest/output. The clips were fine no clicks but when we tried to output it sounded like someone was crinkling cellophane in the background. The odd thing was we were able to output the show as an aiff and then send it to audio post where it played fine. Then they laid it to tape. Our audio people say it is a clocking issue. I don’t see what I can do differently… 1080i in, 1080i seq, 1080i out. Same codec and frame rate all the way through.

We tried: 2 different Macs, 2 different Panasonic 1400s, FCP Rescue 6, and created new projects with just one clip. The one thing I observed was playing out the computer speakers sounded fine, playing through the deck via firwire clicked.

1. Mac 2 x duel core 6 gig ram
FCP 6.02
LaCie Firewire 800 HDs for media, FX rendered to internal raid 0 sata drives

2. Mac 2 x quad core 8 gig ram
FCP 6.02
LaCie Firewire 800 HDs for media, FX rendered to fibre channel Xraid.

Thanks for any and all insights,
Bill

[Bob Cole]

Are you using any other hardware like a Kona card? If so, I’d call their tech support asap.

Do you have lots of audio tracks? When I have had lots of tracks, I’ve experienced some wild audio events — like the audio on A1 suddenly getting louder, at just the point where I had a fade-out on the audio on track 5.

You may want to do a “mix-down” and see whether that helps.

Do you have the same problem with other codecs?

The biggest “gotcha” that I’ve had lately turned out to be the Sony M25 deck. If I left the deck turned on and connected via firewire while editing, I got dropped frames.

Good luck.

Bob C

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 10 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650