[Andrew Rendell]

The line through an audio track is a display of what gain is being applied to the track, it isn’t a measure of what’s recorded there. To assess what’s on there, you need to play the clips and use a combination of your ears and the level meter. Your ears are very important in this as the level meter is really a measure of modulation in a technical sense and isn’t very good for measuring loudness (I actually use a more sophisticated meter, called a PPM, but you don’t really need one of those unless you’re supplying something for broadcasting). As a rule of thumb, adjust the levels so that the level meter shows between -6 and -12 on the louder parts of each clip. You can grab the line in the clip with your cursor/mouse to change it and you can put in marks with the pen tool to set a level in a particular place and have the computer work out the ramping for you (there are other ways of doing this, but that’s a very useful way of doing the cross fades between tracks as well as controlling the levels along a clip).

[Sound mixing is a rather large subject and I’m only scratching at the surface here.]

If you get to a point where your mix sounds right, but the overall level across the project doesn’t seem right, there is an overall level control in the Audio Mixer tool. Normalisation is a way of automatically setting the loudest part of the sound to be at the highest acceptable level – the way I’d use it on a project like this is to do the mix so that it sounds right (without using normalisation), then export it as a single audio file, bring that back into FCP and use it to replace the audio on a copy of your timeline, normalise that and you’re ready to export the timeline for delivery.

Hope that helps

[Andrew Rendell]

You want to look at this:
https://library.creativecow.net/ross_shane/tapeless-workflow_fcp-7/1

Canon do a plug-in (download from their website) which brings the footage in and converts it to ProRes without you having to convert the files outside of FCP. I’ve just tried it and it’s nice and quick and easy.

[Andrew Rendell]

I’m not familiar with that deck, but I’ve had a look at the specs and there’s a couple of things to watch out for:

The deck appears to only record SD and not HDV, but that’s ok as 720 x 480 is SD. So from the FCP I’d export a SD 720 x 480 version of your cut and bring it back into FCP as a single file and play that out to the deck. You probably need to manually record a bit of black at the start of the new tape in order to assemble the new recording onto it.

[Andrew Rendell]

You specify where the autosave fault is in the System Settings (that’s where the autosave files are kept) and you choose the frequency of saving and number of files in the User Preferences. I’d advise getting into the habit of manually saving regularly anyway 🙂

[Andrew Rendell]

I understand that the F3 has a choice of codecs, including a long GOP one – so if you were using that you’d have to convert to a more FCP friendly one. Otherwise, XDCAM is a variation of mpeg, but it’s all i-frames so no GOP issue.

[Andrew Rendell]

It does look a bit of a ‘mare. Looks like you’ve got to set output data format separately from system freq….. remember to unplug the firewire cable each time you make a change, then plug it in again to see if you’ve nailed it. Good luck, I’m sure you’ll get there eventually, it’s mainly about being very careful and methodical.

[Andrew Rendell]

I had it battered into me that you should never transcode (change codec) more than you absolutely have to, in order to avoid concatenation errors building up and ruining the quality that you had in the suite by the time it gets to the viewer. So I’d be inclined to give the Sony plug in a go, myself… (just as long as you’re not using the long GOP codec)

[Andrew Rendell]

Google is my friend: ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/panasonic/drivers/PBTS/manuals/OM_AJ-HD1400.pdf

It does sound like the firewire setting isn’t right – hopefully if you download that manual the information you need will be in there.

[Andrew Rendell]

+1 to Tom’s answer.

It’s never as simple to upgrade a project to a new software version as it should be. You’d probably be ok if you haven’t got any complicated effects going on but it’s a gamble, my experience is that whenever I’ve had software upgraded during a job (not just on a computer, I once had an upgrade on a big vision mixer done overnight) something has gone awry somewhere.

Beware geeks bearing gifts.

[Andrew Rendell]

It’s basically because the camcorder is recording in an AVCHD codec, which is very efficient at making the files relatively small but can’t be edited properly by something like FCP (well they sort of can, but it’s a difficult process for the computer to handle so it doesn’t work very well), so the files have to be converted to a format that FCP can work with properly and those files will be a lot bigger than the ones that came from the camera.