[Andreas Kiel]

Hi,

readXML only works on 10.4.11.
unfortunately I lost the source code when “some people cleaned up my office”.

But there is the markerTool on my website, which is not that complexas readXML had been – and it’s only for markers.
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/markerTool

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Jordan,

What’s the source of the audio? If that audio came originally from external sound devices as BWAV files this behaviour is “normal”. Audio Playback is interpreted based upon the Final Cut Pro project settings during the import of the audio file.

Your problem now is that your now after you just copied the files from one project to the other Final Cut has written the audio interpretation into the project file and you can’t get rid of it any more.

Hopefully you have a backup.

To move misinterpreted audio from one project to another you never should have both projects open the same time – that’s risky.
What you can do is to clear anything in the sequence but audio. To be 100% sure make the audio offline. Then export the sequence as XML.
Open the XML with a text editor and replace following “30” with “24” and “DF” with “NDF“. Save the XML.

Now in your target project make sure the project settings are set to 23.976. Then import the XML and reconnect all audio. In most cases the audio is re-interpreted at the correct playback speed.

Good luck

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi Gary,

Unfortunately I won’t be there this year, but Björn is there.

Regards
Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

[Gary AdCock] That would be flagged as a dropped frame error on the tape by the engineer in Standards and will be rejected as “failing to meet quality standard for error free transmission””

Hm,

We can discuss the needed amount of the “2’s” but there is no reason why the resulting file should be flagged as anything unusual including Drop Frame. The resulting file will have 25 FPS FPS and as long as the colors are correct there would be no issue from the technical side.

If your background would be film and you would have worked with it in the “old” days you would understand Dennis’s approach.
Beside the hardware based conversion these days software would allow (or help for) an even better conversion than hardware alone (sometimes it even can’t be done with hardware) – BUT this would include a horrible amount of time to be spent with roto painting and roto spline (or masking) and therefore doesn’t make sense for most of nowadays productions.

I do quite a lot of these “handmade” movies for R&D sometimes boosting up the frame rate by factor 10 – so I know how to do it and match all the technical specs.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Riana,

Could you post just 2 or 3 frames of the movie somewhere. I will have a look.
You also could send them (zipped) to my email address: kiel(at)spherico.com

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi Scott,

It depends on where you start with the subtitles.

If you need to spot every title Subbits from VideoToolShed is a good choice also BelleNuit is a good professional tool. Both need a bit of learning how to work with them, but I thinks it’s okay.
From both of them you can export rendered subtitles for import into DVDSP and Final Cut Pro.
Subbits also includes a basic subtitle generator for Final Cut Pro which can be used inside the app to export and XML for usage with Final Cut Pro.
Another option is to do the stuff within Final Cut – though this requires some steps and also depends on what state of the project you start with the creation of subtitles.
Here a description on how to do it with a final cut. Step thru the movie and create a Chapter marker at those times you need a subtitle. You can type in the first words of the original language as a mnemonic.
Then export the sequence including chapter markers in a format the translators can use – it must be QuickTime otherwise chapters are lost.
Now export the sequence as XML. Download the free “markerTool” from my website (link below) and import all sequence chapter markers. After you’ve done that all chapter markers are in the clipboard. You can paste them to text file, Excel, FMP or whatever.
Now send both the movie and the chapter/title file to the translator. They can use the movie chapters to jump to a certain title to see and hear picture and sound to make the translation and set subtitle out times. When everything is done the translation document will be sent back. You can use use my free markerTool then again to incorporate the titles into the sequence (or even into the clips of the sequence).
From there you can use another (not free) application of mine to transport back the info into FCP by creating an XML which can use (more or less) any generator of your choice. It’s called TitleExchange. The application allows to move around subtitle information between several applications and formats – so for example you can use Subbits or BelleNuit to create the subtitles and the subtitle timing and then use TitleExchange to create generators of your choice in FCP automatically using the files you created with any of these two apps. Using generators (not Boris and not FxFactory generator as they can’t be controlled from external apps) is often a good choice as you are able to make text changes directly in FCP without the need of re-rendering a picture file.
Title Exchange also allows to modify all fonts settings of a whole sequence with a few easy steps.

Here another workflow which was described on LAFCPUG
https://www.lafcpug.org/phorum/read.php?1,224140,224543#msg-224543

Hope that helps a bit. Keep in mind that creating subtitles is an art of of it’s own. It’s not just getting some text into a video.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi Jeremy, Alex

DV and DVPro are only the same with NTSC, PAL is different.

With PAL DV uses 4:2:0 sampling, DVPro 4:1:1 sampling (same as with NTSC).
So it depends on what you want to do. If your target is DVD you should use DV as MPEG-2 also uses 4:2:0 sampling (with DVCPro your final sampling will be 4:1:0 means a quality loss). If you want to go to NTSC whatever (except DVD) DVCPro would be the better choice.

But I don’t know what kind of sampling comes out of the Sony machine.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Forgot to say why this happens, I said it in my first reply – it’s because the audio doesn’t have QT timecode and that is what FCP is searching for. The timecode you see with audio is more like an “TC effect” and can’t be retrieved at certain frame as long as the file is not open (and cached) in a FCP project. It could even happen that if you drag a synced clip from one project to the other it will loose sync.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi Fredy,

Yes it’s the problem I described. Media manager uses an internal XML roundtrip will definitively bring any external sound out of sync.

For a beta of this workflow app you have to wait till after NAB.
Drop me a mail: kiel(at)spherico.com and will notify you.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Yes there are problems if external audio is involved with merged clips, subclips and multiclips. Often they don’t show up as long as you stay within your project and everything works fine.
Problems with merged or linked clips often occur if you an insert into a merged clip. Also match frame often goes to the wrong frame.
Anything which involves a reconnect with multiclips build from merged clips will loose the sync – same with XML roundtrips. Also subclips are affected by that.
So people who say working this way is not save are right.
The main for that is that audio does not have a standard QuickTime TC track and with reconnect or other operations the TC of the audio which is based upon a timestamp frame is assumed to be 00:00:00:00 which causes the loss of sync.

As long as you don’t need an audio EDL a real save way to work is to create merged clips by QuickTime export. You can still create an OMF for sound sweetening if needed.
The problem with that is that the reconnect is a little bit tricky. You can’t reconnect directly as FCP would give you an error that the count of audio channels don’t match. Just importing the exported files you may loose the metadata you already entered. So the option is to create a batch list of the original clips without the channel stettings i.e 1V,2A and reconnect from there.

I’ve a customer who is producing 5 different daily soaps means 30 multiclip productions a week. They did run into this kind of trouble way to often. I build them a workflow which does the sync and creation of movies outside of Final Cut and imports those clips into Final Cut by XML.
This is fast and and save and requires nearly no user interaction. For 70 G of P2 data plus external audio the application needs less than 2 minutes to create all needed clips as referenced movies (Intel 8 core), if they do save the files as self-contained – which means they include the P2 transfer process – it takes 30 minutes. Both audio and video metadata are completely included. This process is 20% faster than using the Apple Log & Transfer for just the P2 data.

If you interested in this workflow let me know.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools