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VERY STRANGE glitch with export/ compression to H.264 – part of the video is very pixelated, file is corrupt
I’m dealing with a truly bizarre situation that I haven’t encountered in 6 years of video work. I’m an an iMac OSX 10.7, editing a feature doc in Final Cut 7. All of the media in the timeline is Apple ProRes 422 HQ, 23.98, with the exception of some still photos that are png or tiff.
Lately, EVERY time I compress the sequence to H.264 (1920×1080, data rate 1500kbps, 23.98), I end up with a corrupted export. The first 10 seconds or so look totally fine, but after that the video is VERY pixelated, as if I had a 300kbps data rate or lower. Also, I can’t scrub ahead in the video in QT player or the picture is just black and it freezes up. It will only play back in real time. I always export a full res QT from the sequence first, which is always completely fine, and then drop that QT into Compressor or MPEG Streamclip (doesn’t matter which I choose) with the appropriate compression settings, and the resulting H.264 QT file always has that pixelation glitch.
To make matters even MORE bizarre, yesterday I imported my pixelated export into my FCP project to check out all the specs, etc., make sure they all looked normal, and I was wondering if it would play back okay within Final Cut (I was clearly desperate for answers.) It froze up my project, causing my to force quit, and since then my project file is totally messed up. It takes forever to boot up and operates REALLY slowly. I deleted the corrupted export from the project, and deleted it from my computer, emptied the trash, and the corrupted file KEEPS COMING BACK. Again and again and again. I delete it, empty the trash, shut down the computer, and when I go to boot up my project, the corrupted file pops back up again on the desktop. It’s like a zombie! I sense that this corrupted file is the reason my system is operating so slowly, and yet I can’t get rid of it.
I tried cleaning house with everything – trashed my FCP preferences, created a totally new FCP project, new master sequence, and re-imported everything. But it’s still slow, freezing constantly, and the zombie file still won’t die.
Has anyone EVER encountered something like this? Needless to say, I haven’t found any similar situations on the internet….
Thank you,
Freddy
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4 Replies
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Try creating a new user on the system. Sounds weird, but I hear it sometimes helps, probably because it has no pre-set associations to any files.
Also, have you run drive diagnostics yet? Ope Disk Utility and have it do a look-see.
What is it about your still images that differs, any details there?
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Thanks for the reply Mark. I ran diagnostics on all of the drives, and they all appear to be okay. I don’t believe there’s anything unusual about the stills – I’ve worked several times before with png’s and tiffs in a sequence. They’re all 2000 pixels or less, so it shouldn’t be anything the video card/ memory can’t handle.
Creating a new system user did cross my mind as a solution, but wouldn’t that require re-installing all of my software for the new user? Perhaps it’s a necessary step… but I’m on a deadline and it would certainly set me back. Might be worth it anyway!
Thanks again,
Freddy -
Okay nevermind, it doesn’t require re-installing any software. But I created a new user, and while the zombie file appears to be gone, my system is still totally slow and freezing all the time. Perhaps this is a sign that I need to get a new iMac, but boy the timing could not have been worse. Any other ideas?
Thanks,
Freddy -
What is the state of your boot drive? How full is it? What do you have for a scratch drive for the a/v files, and what kind of connection are you using between the boot drive, processor, and RADI/scratch drive?
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