[Andy Mees]

Hi Jerome

theres been a few threads on this recently … as far as I can tell its from a corrupt installation of FCP5.
also, the general opinion seems to be that ‘upgrade’ installs are to blame for pretty much most of the problems users have been seeing.

your best bet is a fresh install of FCP5 and try it again.

best
Andy

[Andy Mees]

hi Christian

it does smack of bad RAM … if the crashing doesn’t fit any particuar pattern and isn’t limited soley to FCP then it may be that you have some RAM gone bad … try going back to the original RAM configuration as shipped, see if it still happens … if you haven’t installed any extra third party RAM, or if it still crashes even with the original RAM, then try swapping out the RAM you do have one stick at a time and see if you can find a bad one.

hope it helps
Andy

[Andy Mees]

we’ve often seen this problem occur when the audio has been captured at the wrong sample rate and has then been resampled by FCP in the timeline, it doesn’t seem to do a very good job of resampling.

in our case, the issue was usually with audio tracks that were brought in at 44.1Khz and then used in a 48kHz timeline, although I imagine its a universal problem not limited to the original source.

for us, it was easily solved by always ensuring that the audio was captured, or recaptured, at the correct sample rate.

hope it helps

Andy

[Andy Mees]

HI Johnnie

can you tell us if this is happening with any and every QT codec or only with exporting to DV?
and is this only happening from within FCP? or in every app?
has this suddenly started happening when it was fine before? or is after an installation or upgrade?
is it with one specific clip or any clip?

if you could try to narrow down the scope of the problem, someone may be able to pinpoint the problem.
my guess is its not an issue with FCP5, nor QT per se. but it may be there was some corruption in your installation of it.

Andy

[Andy Mees]

if you export an xml file from an fcp edit there is certainly a lot of data in there, but the trick is only bothering with the bits you actually need.
try exporting an xml file from a single clip (not an edit) … have a good look at that. then do the same with a very simple edit, maybe one, two or three shots on a single layer …. increase the complexity of your examples gradually, don’t just jump in to a complex 5 minute edit. try and get a feel for the structure of the apple xml, what’s identical every time, what changes, what parts seem to be irrelevant?

download the documentaion from the apple developers website and take a look at their examples. theres lots of useful info in there, including how to set up clip id’s so as to avoid replicating identical code …and also note that not all the info in the xml file is mandatory.

it is a bit daunting, but at the end of the day its a simple matter of how comfortable you are with coding, how much time you can devote to the process and whether this is code you will use and reuse again and again … otherwise it may just be quicker to wade into the edit and get it over with.

hope it helps
Andy

[Andy Mees]

have a look at the free software utility called MPEG Streamclip, it might be able to help you
https://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

Andy,

i suppose you could do this with nested sequences, ie build up your edit with 15 layers of (nested) sequences ?
nest each clip (layer) and then recreate the motion and filter settings of the contained clip onto the parent sequence (nest) … painstaking if the paste attributes doesn’t work, but at least you only have to do it once.
then in future you could just drop new footage into each nested sequence, and the motion and filter settings of it parent would apply.

you might want to test this on a simpler project first, rendering edits with nested sequences always seems to be a performance dog, but in theory i think it should work (although if it won’t I’m hopeful it’ll be pointed out by some of the boards more experienced editors before you spend too much time trying it!!)

cheers
Andy Mees

[Andy Mees]

Hi John

you wrote:
“Don’t bother with the Avid codec. It has not been updated in many years and has be known to cause instability in FCP (many people report crashing with out of memory errors).”

thats a bit of a shocker! i knew it wasn’t the freshest codec in the team but i didn’t know it hadn’t been playing fair … could you give me any more info, it sounds like something to investigate (proactive) or at least watch out for (lie back and think of England)

cheers
Andy

(it must be said, we’ve not had any problems thus far)

[Andy Mees]

Hi Robin

sorry to be late in responding … only just spotted your thread

i can confirm the exact same problem. a clip’s alpha completely ignored in the canvas although clearly identified in the viewer …. bizarre.

heres the deal …. something is wrong with your FCP5 install (did you do an update or a fresh install? is that an issue or is that only with the tiger install??)

anyway, after wasting literally hours of valuable time trying to figure out what was wrong, i finally tried the exact same test clips on a different fcp installation …. everything worked perfectly first time. i was dumbfounded. i’d been doing everything ok all along. luckily, in my instance, i had only been testing some clips on my powerbook, and so the error was not critical.

although i haven’t got round to this myself, yet, my best advice is to do a complete fresh reinstall of fcp5, and then try again.

very best of luck
Andy

[Andy Mees]

you might try using the Avid Meridian codecs (Avid Meridian Compressed and Avid Meridain Uncompressed, you can get them from the Avid website) … they are also 32bit codecs and very clean.

in my own (limited) experience, the ‘Compressed’ codec offers an approximate 20% saving in file size. (based on me looking at the one example that happens to be on my harddisk at the moment, so your mileage may vary!)

when we were looking for a suitable GFX interchange format, considering filesize and effective quality, this one seemed the best (cross platform) choice.

hope it helps
Andy