Weird FCP Problem

[Justin Valls]

Nope, unfortunately a new project has the same problem. I just opened a new project, and drug a clip directly from a drive containing media (native format 1080i 48kHz 16 bit integer) to the browser. Double clicking on the clip opens it in the viewer, and playing it creates the distorted low speed audio. When I drag it to the sequence, and press play, it takes a moment for the audio to turn on after the video begins, and another moment to report a dropped frame after i’ve heard the audio distortion. Relatively small clip keep in mind on a dual core with 3 GB RAM.

Justin Fernando Valls
Director/Editor
Abode Productions
Portland, OR

[David Roth weiss]

Justin,

That does sound like a bigger problem than most.

I would suggest cleaning off a firewire drive and doing a complete fresh install of the OS and then FCS on the firewire drive, with all updates on everything. Then boot to the firewire drive and test FCP. If everything works, then we go from there… What do ya say?

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Justin Valls]

i suppose a fresh install it is. we’ll probably take the opportunity to upgrade to leopard. probably won’t hear results till monday…

[Paul Kennard]

I’m having the exact same problem. Did you ever find a fix for this? – Paul

Paul Kennard
Staff Ninja
WITN-TV
Wilmington, DE

[Justin Valls]

Hey Paul,

After we upgraded our operating system to Leopard, the problem resolved for a long time. Have you done the basic maintenance recommended in this thread to keep your system clean?

If you are working with Soundtrack and Motion, I would recommend exporting self-contained movie and audio files from these programs. Using the “Send To” feature is fine, but when you finish your Motion or Soundtrack project, don’t expect FCP to handle it safely in the long run if you simply save and return to FCP.

We’ve encountered many playback problems, and eventually compression export problems when media goes offline that FCP can’t detect. FCP won’t tell you if media files have gone offline within a referenced soundtrack or motion project.

I’d also avoid using too many referenced sequences within one timeline – I’ve found the sync issue is largely associated with large quantities of nested sequences in the same timeline. That’s a limiting work-around, but it seems to have worked for us.

I hope this helps. The whacked out syncing bug is not your fault if that makes you feel any better:)

Justin Fernando Valls
Director/Editor
Abode Productions
Portland, OR

[Penny Lane]

I have spent days trying to fix this problem. This is major and worse than anything I’ve experienced in 6 years of FCP.

Trashed prefs, deleted caches, opened auto-saves, deleted render files, uninstalled FCP and reinstalled it. Some of these things seemed to work for about a minute or so.

I am on a Mac Pro, 2 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2GB RAM. Running OS 10.5.6. All software is as upgraded as I can get it.

My project is set up for HDV and there were some SD clips I was working with. I have a hunch that this was somehow to blame, although the SD clips weren’t the only ones acting up and when I got rid of them the problem persisted.

I tried changing the workflow so that the project was in SD and I was down-converting the HDV files into SD sequences, which seemed to work for a few minutes then lo and behold… audio disappearing, audio out of sync, audio playing back slower.

When this happens there are times when even the audio meters show no activity despite the waveforms.

Am I alone in thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake “upgrading” from my old G5 and FCP 5 to my new Mac Pro and FCP 6? I never had problems like this on that system.

[Gary Adcock]

[Penny Lane] “Am I alone in thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake “upgrading” from my old G5 and FCP 5 to my new Mac Pro and FCP 6? I never had problems like this on that system.”

is all the audio from the camera or is some of it compressed mp3/mp4 audio files?

did you render the entire timeline? or are you just using the RT engine for playback.

Have you done a “mixdown” on the audio prior to playback?

” tried changing the workflow so that the project was in SD and I was down-converting the HDV files into SD sequences, which seemed to work for a few minutes then lo and behold… audio disappearing, audio out of sync, audio playing back slower. “

No sorry but this sounds like sloppy workflow habits, pick one workflow and stay with it, by “changing the workflow” you have caused a disorganized mess that only a good render will clean up.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

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