TIME CODE FILTER PROBLEM

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

There is a function in FCP that is often overlooked… and it can help with many audio and video “skipping”, “sticking” and “missing” problems.

You should “Mixdown” the Audio for playback before you dub out of FCP, or during the edit, if you have audio/video stuttering, drop-outs, sync-slippage, or freezes.

NOTE: Mixdown has even been demonstrated to help with slipping, skipping problems (or “missing” audio clips) for files being EXPORTED as QT (or similar) files out of FCP.

First, SELECT ALL of your audio tracks (highlight them) on the timeline, then:

Sequence Menu > Render Only > Mixdown.

You should see a dialog box telling you its rendering.

It might seem to make little sense that “Mixing down” even simple audio tracks will “fix” complex video “freezes” or random audio dropouts to tape or export, but it CAN.

NOTE: It does not matter of you only have one audio track, if there are random freezes during output, you should try the Mixdown.

[Michael Alberts]

What codec are you working in? You didn’t give us much information to go on. I’ve never experienced this problem with DV or uncomprssed media. However, this is a known issue with P2 material imported into FCP from the HVX200 camera. The fix was to upgrade to 5.1.1 and reimport your media.

Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.

[Zube]

Thank you all for your quick responses.
I will be more specific as I have now isolated the problem….I think.

I shot an hour and a half on a sony XL-1 in extended play (LP)
There are considerable time code breaks on the tape.
capturing all at once on my sony DSR-11 in FCP 3.0 proved to be a nightmare when the sound grew out of synch over time on the captured clip.
(All capture settings were set correctly, unless dropping to LP reduces the sound from 48k)
reguardless of the synch problem, opening the captured clip(s) in FCP 3.0 and adding a timecode filter (and rendering)
caused final cut to “grey out” every option in the file bar. Could not even quit the program let alone export a compressed movie file for burning on DVD, which is the goal here. I would have to force quit and lose the render. This would ALSO corrupt the project file, making it unreadable by FCP 3.0 and suddenly 0klb. This makes sense if I had bad media. So I captured in ten minute segments and put the time code filter on each segment (offsetting each clip filter so the numbers would match and run continuously) HOWEVER since there were time code breaks it would not even PLAY the full 1.5 hours (my plan was to play the whole thing and record it on DV while playing, then recapture).

So considering the timecode breaks are on the orig footage I decided to redub the tapes.
XL-1 to Sony DSR-11.
But what if it was the XL-1? perhaps it is because of recording initialy with LP and not SP… but what if it the camera itself?
So……I dumped from the camera (The Sony DSR-11 does NOT like to play this DV tape) to a VHS.
I am currently dumping from VHS to DV via the DSR-11 with a new clean tape (on SP) and will capture from THAT DV tape.
then I will add the TCG filter, render and hopefully FCP will NOT go ape sh## and I can export a quicktime and burn to DVD.

PS. a good “quick fix” has been trashing the FCP user data folder, but it is a VERY temporary fix for FCP “grey out” problems.

I am loosing quality with what I am doing right now, obviously, but I just want this thing to be over. I will take quality loss if it means a DVD with TC on the screen.
My question now is this: what form of compression should I use to create the final quicktime?
it already looks kooky cause its VHS.
And no, I do NOT own Quicktime PRO.

This has all been over the last three days and I’m burnt.