[Clay Lorance]

Again, I don’t see the workflow efficiency increase in taking 5-10 minutes (an export) to do what can be done in 35 seconds (Save as self-contained) when we have to churn out dozens of these a day with only one or two potentially needing to eventually come into FCP several months later. Plus, a lot of the movs I receive come from another workstation where the only tools at hand are QT, PT or Nuendo. We’re not a video house. We only have/need one seat of FCP.

Also, we use ProTools’ “Bounce to Disk” or Nuendo’s “Replace audio in video file” most of the time. You see, we often have to marry up to 20 different audio tracks to (copies of) the same piece of video. Taking each of these through an export process just isn’t feasible from a time-management perspective.

So my takeaway from all of this is:

There’s no way to get FCP to use all of the audio data that exists in a file even though EVERY SINGLE OTHER PIECE OF SOFTWARE ON MY MACHINE CAN DO IT easily and without fail every single time.

Accurate statement?

[Clay Lorance]

Well, for one, Quick Time opens in about 2 seconds, compared to Final Cut’s 30-second launch time. When I’ve got Nuendo or ProTools running (remember, we’re an audio company), I don’t see the need to launch yet another giant resource hog to do a job that can be done with a much simpler program. Not every .mov we create ends up in a demo reel, and we don’t know until months later which ones will. Spending an extra five minutes (and untold hard drive space) on each file to give it black video at the end when we don’t even know if we’ll need it simply isn’t an option.

Not only that, but these files aren’t always created exactly the way I described. Nuendo, ProTools, Cleaner, etc can all create .mov files with longer audio than video.

So workflow issues aside, there are a lot of different methods by which someone could end up with a .mov that has longer audio than video. Why can’t FCP use these files properly?

[Clay Lorance]

These videos come from multiple sources. We’re a music company. We receive animation from graphics houses for things like show opens, titles, etc. The video we receive is silent with no padding. We score music to it (including music after the graphics for bumping, padding, etc) then marry the audio to the video in QuickTime Pro by simply adding a track to their original .mov. Hence, longer audio than video.

My main use of Final Cut is to make demo reels of our work. I drop various videos created as described above into a session and string them together with transitions.

If 30 bucks worth of Quick Time can create, store, edit, and playback .mov files with audio that is longer than the video, why can’t several hundred dollars worth of Final Cut Pro use them?

[Clay Lorance]

Nope! It’s not a “link” problem. It appears as though the audio just isn’t even brought into the project. It’s like there’s an underlying assumption that no one could possibly want audio without video. And the strangest thing is, I seem to be the only person who’s ever run into this. I can find no mention of it on the Internet at all. None! Thousands of users, and only one has ever had a .mov whose audio is longer than the video?

–CL