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Strange Render problem with dissolves
Hello Cow universe –
Working on a feature film. Having a strange annomally in my timeline. When I’m using
“cross dissolves” in certain places, I’m experiencing a weird “hitch” in playback. It’s as if in the there is a frame skipped at the beginning and end of a 24 frame dissolve.My source material is dvcpro HD 24 frames per second. It doesn’t happan all the time, but frequently. It doesn’t matter if I shave the time of the dissolve. It could be 22 frames, 25 frames. It still hickups.
Any thoughts about this? It’s not a playback issue, either. I’ve exported the whole timeline and it still occurs at the same places in the baked-down movie as it does when playing live in the timeline.
Thanks, Byrd
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4 Replies
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Byrd,
In my experience, I’ve never found Cross Dissolves to consistently render quite as smoothly and evenly as I’d always want them to… it depends on the footage that you’re using. It’s not ACTUALLY the cross dissolve, it’s more like an optical illusion that can appear smoother or more rough depending on your A and B clip.
Try opening up one of the bad cross dissolves in the viewer and changing the starting opacity to 8% (or the ending opacity to 92%, if it looks like the cross dissolve is flashing off at the end). If all else fails, do a cross dissolve manually with your opacity overlays – you can command+click on opacity keys with the pen tool to add bezier handles and can make a smooth ramped fade, a logarithmic-like fade, etc.
Does that help, or are the fades actually rendering wrong? (…if it helps, I want tickets to the premiere!)
All the best,
Ben
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Is the DVCPRO-HD footage from a P2 card? And if so, what version of Final Cut was being used when it was digitized (imported, ingested, copied, whatever you want to call it)? There is a bug in how Final Cut versions prior to, I believe, 5.1.2, handle this footage. The bug has something to do with framerates and can cause footage that needs to be rendered, for whatever reason, to be offset by a few frames. The length of the offset seems to depend on the clip length. This will make little skips at the beginning or end of dissolves between a rendered clip and a clip that doesn’t need rendering.
In order to get properly working media, the footage would need to be re-imported from the original P2 cards in FCP 5.1.2 or later.
As a workaround, if that’s infeasible, you can try adding an effect to the unrendered clip that won’t change the clip but make it renderable (Quicktime Blur set at 0, for example). This will force Final Cut to render the clip and hopefully get rid of your jump.
Hope that helps. I had this issue on a project a while ago and it took a lot of tinkering to finally figure this one out.
– David
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Q1 Are there any filters on the clips involved in the transition?
Q2 Did either clip need to be rendered at all, for any reason? (i.e. different clip settings from that of the Sequence.)Neil.
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Thanks so much. You nailed it. The footage was imported from P2 using an early version of Final Cut Prol. I had never heard about that bug before, so thank you so much. Furthermore, your trip to add a filter and turning it to zero removed the double frame issues. I used a contast/ brightness filter turned to 0, which had no effect. Baffled by how that would solve the problem, but don’t need to know, cause it did.
To answer another question, I’m using a native dvcpro hd sequencee (the preset for 23.98 frames per second.). My render settings are all set to 100%, and rendering everything, including FULL, gray bar effects.
Problem solved, but what a large bug. Surprised I hadn’t read about that before as I’ve followed P2 avidly since it appeared on the HDX 200.
Best,
Byrd
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