Recording entire tape breaks video into several clips

[Walter Biscardi]

[cbreaker] “When I take a tape and just click “Record now” at the beginning of the tape, FCP will capture the entire tape but it will break up the clips at seemingly random points.”

These are Time Code breaks and you have your Preferences set to “Make New Clip” on a TC Break. This is default on FCP.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Joseph Jamieson]

Ohh I bet that’s it. I usually stripe tapes before I used them so this doesn’t happen so much but on this occasion, I didn’t have the time and I had someone that’s not that great at using a camera on the 2nd unit and he probably messed up.

I’d only been capturing from the tapes from that camera, so I bet that’s it.

Do you know what happens when this happens? Meaning, will FCP just continue the timecode itself or will the clip be screwy if I just ignore the TC breaks and warn after capture?

I don’t care about the timecode on the tape, really. I just want the entire tape captured out to FCP.

[Leigh Jewell]

If you have it set to make a new clip on timecode break, Final Cut will find the break, then start capturing again and create a new clip. You will lose about 3 seconds or whatever your pre-roll is set for.
It won’t screw up your clip if you don’t do have it create a new clip but your timecode will be screwed up and won’t match what is on the tape.
If you truly don’t care about the timecode, I believe you just need to set the preference to “warn after capture.”

Leigh

[Joseph Jamieson]

Great, I’ll try it tonight when I get home. I really hope I can get these tapes dumped; it’s going to take over 10 hours to get them all done so this issue has really put a damper on my progress.

Thanks for your help guys! That was fast. I guess this is *the* forum for help with this stuff.

[David Bogie]

> When I take a tape and just click “Record now” at the beginning of the tape, FCP will capture the entire tape but it will break up the clips at seemingly random points. On one particular tape, FCP broke up the tape into 5 clips, one was 20 minutes, another was 5, another 30, etc.< Contrary to the other guys, who actually know much more about this than I do, it is my understanding that HDV comes in this way and there's nothing you can do about it. Hope I'm wrong. Please come back and close the thread with your solution. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Joseph Jamieson]

Well, you’re right. I think this is a bug in FCP.

I have several tapes that I’ve tried now, and I know at least some of them are fine – the camera was on the tripod the whole time and the recording went from beginning to end without stopping. The timecode on the tape is correct. All of the tapes do this. The odd thing is that FCP will mark new clips at seemingly random points even with the same tape.

I am able to take the same tapes into Premiere and capture the entire tape without issue. (All of them.)

It might not be exactly a bug in the strictest sense – there might be some anomaly with the some piece of hardware or a driver, but FCP is not resilient enough to handle it.

Because of this problem, FCP is sort of going to be very inefficient. I was planning on using the multicam features, which are really easy to use, but now I’m going to have to somehow combine each tape’s video files into a single one – which is going to be difficult because the clips don’t cut perfectly from one to the other. There’s a gap of missing video at least a few seconds long.

If anyone knows of an alternate way I can capture the video, in a way that produces HDV files that are native to FCP, please share. Maybe there’s a simple capture tool I can use to capture the tapes? On windows you can use capdvhs to at least grab m2v streams which you can use in Premiere Pro. (Too bad editing HDV with Premiere Pro is like cutting the lawn with nail clippers.)

Help =)

[Joseph Jamieson]

Note, I also tried capturing using the apple intermediate codec, and it does the same thing.

Is there any way to capture without FCP? Some utility app or something?

[John]

[cbreaker] “Note, I also tried capturing using the apple intermediate codec, and it does the same thing.”

It sounds like you may need to trash the FCP prefs. I had a very similar issue with a Sony v1u not capturing reliably. After trashing FCP prefs everything returned to normal — except for the breaking up of clips. With the v1u, no matter what pref setting I choose for how to handle TC breaks, or what format the source was recorded in (60i, 24p, 24pAdv), all clips come in as separate QT files. Even a Capture Now breaks up the material into separate files as if FCP is sensing a TC break at each camera start/stop point.

To trash FCP prefs, through away the following files and relaunch:

– Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist
– Home/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro 5.0 Prefs
– Home/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Obj Cache
– Home/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Prof Cache

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[Joseph Jamieson]

So you’re saying that even after you deleted your preferences, it was still broken?

What a pain this is. I mean, I have a tape here from a camcorder that ran the entire tape from start to finish with no stops, no stream breaks (tape hiccups, etc) while sitting on a tripod. I get no less then 4 clips when I just do a “Capture Now” to try and grab the whole tape.

I’ll try deleting the preferences tomorrow and see if it helps.

[Tom Wolsky]

Are you talking about HDV material? That will break up at shot changes regardless of the setting in clip settings for breaking up clips. As far as I know for most cameras there is no way around this with HDV material or material transcoded to AIC.

All the best,

Tom

Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs