Debe
Forum Replies Created
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Are there any effects on the clip that’s having a cow that you have rendered? It could be a corrupt render file. I’ve seen it happen to others, although I’ve not encountered it myself.
If there are any effects, filters, speed, motion, anything, try trashing all your render files and re-render. If your project is organized in such a way that you can identify exactly which render files are in your current sequence, you may be able to save the other files, but most of us, even the most organized, can’t necessarily tell that.
If that doesn’t solve it, post back!
debe
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When you saved the Tiff file, was there an option to include the alpha that perhaps you overlooked? Try opening it up in Photoshop or whatever program you used, do a “Save As”, and make sure the option to retain the alpha information is selected.
If you have Photoshop, you can also try “Save As”, and make it a photoshop document. That will also retain the alpha information if you tell it to. It results in a larger file, though.
Try either, or both, and if that doesn’t help, please post back!
debe
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…but thanks for the nod!
I’m a little too quick with that “Submit Post” button….I didn’t finish my thought process!
debe
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Hey, Bogiesan, the more the merrier!!
I’d appreciate another take on how to accomplish what the poster is asking about! Who knows, maybe your idea will work better for Russmann!!
debe
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To pull a proper “superblack” key, the black needs to be at least 8, but better if it’s 10 IRE lower than the the darkest part of the animation. If you have any black in the animation and it’s at the same level as the background black, it won’t work correctly.
You need a real waveform monitor to know where you’re at in real IRE. The FCP internal scopes don’t really measure true IRE. They measure things in terms of FCP units, which aren’t the same as IRE units. You can fake it, but you’ll need time to test it. You’d need to pull the animation back into FCP from the tape and try the key yourself in FCP. If you can get it to work in FCP, the next step it to test it on whatever is the intended destination/use for the animation. It may take several back and forth runs to get something that works.
The best thing to do might be to create a second alpha animation, which is your animation, but everything is turned white. Then whoever is doing the keying can marry the fill to the alpha (color animation to the white animation), and use the white alpha information to knock out the rest of the black to give your your key. In both these situations, of you’ve added a soft drop shadow to the animation, it might be problematic, and you may be better off leaving it off on your animation adding the shadow when the key is made.
If it’s a linear situation, then they’d have two tapes and marry them together that way. You can give them two tapes with timecodes that match, or they can make a copy. Make sure the animations start on an even, whole frame number, preferably a whole minute or second, and that you notate what that number is for the fill and the alpha. If it’s another NLE situation, they can just capture both and line them up on a timeline.
debe
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You say you can’t save anything “new or old”. Does this include making a new project?
If FCP won’t even let you make a new project, then there is something really wrong…and it may be best to figure out what it is before you soldier on and try to recreate what you’ve lost for fear of losing the new work, too.
If you can make a new project, I think Jerry may have meant copy as much out of the old, corrupt project that you can and actually paste it into the new project. Doing a “Save As” to get a new project would likely bring the corruption along with it, and might be why FCP won’t let you do that. So the next thing to try is to make a new project first, and copy and paste out of the old project into the new project, hopefully avoiding the corruption. Of course, you may have already tried that and I’m just not reading things correctly here!
It also might be a good idea to ditch all your render files now and re-render once you’ve got a stable project later. A lot of times a corruption is in the render files. Sometimes, though, it is somewhere in the media, and sometimes it really is the project file. It can be a chicken or egg thing, does a corrupt render or media file corrupt the project file, or can a corrupt project file wreak havok on the media or render files?
At this point, if you can’t even get a new project created and saved, I might suggest reinstalling the software. Drastic, I know, but if you can’t even make a new project, then this is a HUGE problem that likely won’t go away, and will just make things worse the longer you try to limp along. I had a different problem with FCP 4 about 18 months ago, and the longer I tried to just muddle through because I was so close to the end, the farther back I ended up having to go to get to a stable project. I lost over 18 hours of work and had to recreate it from scratch. Luckily, the second time usually goes much faster because all the decisions have already been made and it’s just a matter of recreating things, and it does usually take much less time. I was back to where I left off in about 6 hours. If I had stopped and figured it out, it wouldn’t have been a 24 hour ordeal, though. It may have only been an 8-12 hour one!
Oh, before you go the reinstall route, though, did you try trashing preferences and repairing permissions? I don’t like to recommend that too often, because it is really just a broad-spectrum solution that doesn’t really tell you what’s wrong. However, it can help, and if you’re under a deadline and/or you have a client or producer in the room, sometimes it can get you up and running. You lose the opportunity to learn something, but not every problem has to be a teaching moment!
If you’re not familiar with those terms:
Repairing permissions is done in Disk Utility usually located in [main hard drive]>Applications>Utilities.
For info on trashing prefs, look at this site…
https://www.lafcpug.org/trashing_fcp_prefs.html
The following is a nifty little program that stores and trashes prefs for you. Just be careful backing up the first time. Make sure you’re backing up clean prefs.
https://fcprescue.andersholck.com/
Hope something in here helps!!
debe
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Ooh!!
Sorry for the double post! Burned by the “Post Direct” bug again!!
debe
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No problemo, Mark!!
Ya wanna know how I figured that was what you were doin’??!!?
‘Cos I did it to a while back, and nearly drove myself nutz tryin’ to figure it out!!
debe!
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No problemo, Mark!!
Ya wanna know how I figured that was what you were doin’??!!?
‘Cos I did it to a while back, and nearly drove myself nutz tryin’ to figure it out!!
debe!
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Mark–
Where were you changing the settings? If you we’re changing them in the Final Cut Pro>Easy Setups or Final Cut Pro>Audio/Video Settings>Sequence Presets, you were merely changing what future sequences would be. To change your current sequence, you need to go to Sequence>Settings, or Command+0 (zero).
debe