Renders from other programs 1 frame short

[David Roth weiss]

[Nathan Caswell] “nobody seems to know what the solution is other than to “work with handles”.
“

Yes? That’s the foolproof solution. Why worry about another that’s anything less than foolproof?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
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, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Bret Williams]

Does this have anything to do with the common misconception about the out frame in FCP and whether it’s inclusive or exclusive? Because I’ve never seen anything from ae come in shorter than I expected. I’ve seen a lot of gamma shifts, but not length issues. What happens? You export a clip , add an effect in AE, then it comes back too short?

[Nathan Caswell]

Bunch of reasons… the convenience of not having to trim and slip renders every time an animator exports a new version of a shot. The issue of the wasted time rotoing, tracking, time remapping, stabilizing, retouching and compositing extra frames of 4k footage (7 telecine passes for each shot). Also the job is being finished in a Flame and it’d be nice to know that the final approved shots can be simply rendered out of their comps as SGI sequences that will line up in perfect order for the conform… but mainly cause it annoys me that I can’t figure out what is causing this bug.

The footage has handles out of the Telecine. If I wanted to tell the animators to composite their scenes long I could… I was just wondering if anyone knew the solution to this problem.

[Nathan Caswell]

No, has nothing to do with the out point. No renders out of Final Cut, we’re all accessing the same source.

I export an Automatic Duck XML which gets imported to an After Effects project. Source reconnects. The AE comp is the right length. There’s a lo res reference edit to confirm that everything matches to the frame. I go in and difference mode the reference edit to the hi res footage to make sure. I render out a QT movie import it into Final Cut and it lines up perfect.

I pass the shot off to an animator. They do their thing. If they render an image sequence of the comp it comes out the right number of frames. If they render a Quicktime about 50% of the time it imports into Final Cut a frame short. The shots are missing frames in Quicktime as well, which obviously makes you think it’s an After Effects issue, but I know there are people out there that have similar problems with Combustion too – even Color. Think it’s therefore a Quicktime/FCP issue.

If an animator renders out the shot on his machine sometimes it’ll come in a frame short… then I’ll tell him to add a frame to his comp and when he re-renders it it’ll come in a frame LONG. Like it got the missing frame back and another frame. Bizarre. Again, this has happened at numerous studios on numerous machines in numerous codecs. If the computer has FCS installed on it it does not seem to happen. It has happened on machines that don’t have FCS installed but have the Apple Pro Res codec installed, or Uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 installed.

I’m surprised that nobody here has run into it… all the editors I’ve talked to personally (that do a lot of fx heavy work) say they know about it but not why and just deal with it with handles.

[Burt Hazard]

Yeah, it is pretty annoying, but like so many things I’ve just gotten used to it! 🙂

I’ve run into this type of problem because I’m doing my main compositing work in Shake but all my main roto work in Silhouette Roto. I had bought the FCP/AE plugin version of Silhouette previously and at the time had thought it was a pretty neat idea, but have lived to regret it since I’m working with image sequences in Shake projects, so I then have to convert ’em to self-contained QT movs to bring into FCP, place the Silhouette Roto filter on ’em, etc.; a really cumbersome way of working (although I’d have to export the shapes back into Shake anyway). And because of the non-linear editor drop-frame etc. nature of FCP, a lot of times I will have to deal with missing a final frame in which I have to tweak the roto shapes directly in Shake’s cumbersome bezier rotoshapes which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place!

But for me the better solution will be to upgrade to the most recent standalone version of Silhouette so I can just work with image sequences natively. (Otherwise, handles are the way to go.)

[Bj Ahlen]

Are you sure there isn’t an interlaced UFF/LFF setting somewhere that creates this?

At the end of a clip, could it find itself with say an odd field with no corresponding even field, so it throws the frame away?

[Bj Ahlen]

I’m wondering if the Corrupt Clip Finder could find the problem.

You could use their 15-day free trial to find out.

(I have no connection with DR.)