[David Eaks]

Well, this reproduces the LOOK of your problem when played back. Looking at your screenshot it doesn’t look like this is whats going on in your timeline though-

[David Eaks]

[craig flood] “Not sure what you mean by this.”

[craig flood] “I’m sorry, its not a compound clip. Its just a “storyline” above the story line. If that makes sense. But it has not been created into a compound clip, I can’t not open it up in another timeline as such to examine it and work on it.”

OK, a secondary storyline. I’m unable to reproduce the problem your having. What if you delete just the troublesome logo from the timeline, then edit it back to the timeline from the event browser, add transitions and render it. Maybe its a bad render file.

[David Eaks]

From within the compound clip, does the logo have handles extending beyond the outpoint of the compound clip? Does the logo itself have a cross dissolve inside of the compound clip?

I think I’ve seen this before but can’t put my finger on it. What version FCP and OS X are you running?

[David Eaks]

[Russ Haskell] “and I would essentially get an over-write edit for 3 seconds from the head and have two seconds of the tail remaining from the “old” clip.”

Ahh, well you want use overwrite edit for that. Place the playhead at the inpoint of the TL clip, select the new clip (or range) in the Event Bowser, press D.

[Russ Haskell] ” (And with similar results from choosing Replace from End except the edit would begin from the out points of both clips.”

Same as above but playhead at out point and Shift-D. You can customize video and/or audio only shortcuts as well.

[Russ Haskell] “That understanding was based on the manual saying that both options used the length of the TL clip in determining the duration of the edit. But after reading Larry’s article, I guess the answer to my question is simply I am not reading the manual correctly.”

Yeah, I think what was confusing you was the “use duration of event clip” part. It will use the available handles beyond your range selection to fill in the the exact duration of the clip being replaced. So that the duration of your timeline does not change. If your Event clip is shorter, it ripples. Replace edit is going to “replace” the entire TL clip, overwrite will (can) leave some of it.

[David Eaks]

Hmm, is the logo in a compound clip? In the primary or as connected clip?

[David Eaks]

[Charlie Austin] “Not sure why this would happen…”

Try replace from start with an entire clip from the event browser (not a range selection) which is shorter in duration than the timeline clip. You get the “not enough media” warning pop up, unless “do not show again” had previously been ticked.

[David Eaks]

What is it that you’re expecting to happen?

Does this Larry Jordan article answer your question?

[David Eaks]

Try adding a short gap clip to the end so the cross dissolve is going between the logo and gap clip (hit the end key then option-W). Trim the gap clip so your project has 2-3 frames of black at the end.

Does it fade out correctly now?

[David Eaks]

Walter, as I posted above, If you install FCP X first FCP 7 won’t install. Unless you put FCP X into a subfolder within the Applications folder. If you install FCP X second, it will move FCP 7 into a subfolder automatically.

Apple has an installation best practices page. And there is a ton of info out there about installing both.

It is absolutely possible to run the current versions of OS X, FCP X AND FCP 7 on the same partition. Your unnatural hatred is misplaced.

[David Eaks]

I agree with Ryan’s advice and I would not recommend buying the current Mac Pro. I don’t think you’d get the performance increase your looking for.

For your Main concern, H.264, I highly recommend Matrox MAX. The CompressHD card or a MAX enabled MXO2 device (I have three of these devices, MAX MXO2LE, no MAX Mini and CompressHD). Used with Compressor to create H.264 in just under real time. I do a lot of 90-120 min H.264s and can’t imagine working without it.

Since MAX uses its own hardware to do the encode, your systems resources are not tied up. With a combination of CompressHD and MXO2, you can both encode H.264 in Compressor and monitor in FCP simultaneously. I assume you’d be fine monitoring with you Kona while Compressor/MAX crunch away In the background.

My workflow is export with current settings from FCP and bring that into Compressor to create the H.264. Though I’m 98% FCPX now, when I was on FCP7, I didn’t have any problems the exporting Reference movies and bringing them into Compressor (just be sure to add an identifier like “REF” to the file name and trash it when your done with it). The workflow goes from huge overnight encodes to just a couple hours. Nice.