Don Greening
Forum Replies Created
-
[Atari Norris] “I’ve had people say it may be a bit rate problem, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, or how to fix it if it is.”
If your audio capture setting doesn’t match the source setting very often you’ll experience glitches in the way you’ve described. With Mini DV for example, there are 2 formats: 16bit 48k or 12bit 32k. You need to find out what setting the audio was recorded at and match the capture settings in the NLE.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
Hi John,
Sounds like things are going downhill fast, huh? OK, try booting up from your OSX Installation DVD. If that works then run Disc Utility from the disc, not from your hard drive. See if that finds anything. I’m a bit concerned that you couldn’t boot up from the Disk Warrior CD which makes me think it might be a hardware thing. Right now it’s just a process of elimination. If you can’t boot up from the OSX Install disc then pull the new RAM out and try again. Basically you want to have everything back the way it was before the Mac started screwing up. Sometimes Macs don’t like mixing RAM from different manufacturers and it has a big hissy fit. If you pull the RAM out and it still won’t behave (startup from the OSX Install disc) then you’ll have to take your machine in and have a hardware test done.
Satrting up from the Disk Warrior CD by holding down the “C” key should only take 4-5 minutes. If you can’t do that or boot from the OSX install DVD then you wouldn’t be able to re-install the OS or anything else for that matter. Hence the suggestion to have a hardware test done. I don’t want to scare you premeturely but I recently had to have the main PC board replaced under warranty in my 2.7 G5. First time I ever had a hardware problem in all the Macs I’ve owned, and that’s going back to the early 90’s.
Keep me posted.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
Welcome.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
[Jack Catfish] “Anyone else out there having these conflicts?”
Yup. Just about everybody. I can’t find a Sony CRT anymore so I’m forced to consider the high end Panny for my imminent purchace.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
[johnny5] “Finally, if I run Disk Warrior and still encounter issues, do I try other options, move to a FCP reinstall or full OSX re-install?”
Try Disk Warrior first and see if that makes a difference. Perhaps your thoughts about re-installing FCP or the OS might be a bit premature at this point. Disk Warrior was designed to fix directories that get corrputed with use. Run it from the install CD so you can use it on the startup drive first and then on your media drive(s). Remember that putting video media on your startup drive is a no-no because of the host of problems that can occur when running FCP. But then, you already knew that. Just trying to cover all the bases here. To keep your Mac in top shape for running the pro apps it might be worthwhile for you to download and read the article by Jerry Hofmann in the first Creative Cow online magazine. He goes into great detail about configuring and mantaining a Mac/FCP system. Novice and experienced users can benefit from this article.
I’ll continue to watch this thread for any more posts.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
Let me know how you make out, John.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
Without being there looking over your shoulder I’ll have to make an educated guess. The first thing I’d do is trash the FCP preference files. If you don’t know how to do this then go here:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/trashing_fcp_prefs.html
Google the free program “FCP Rescue”. it’s a wonderful little program that will do the trashing preferences job for you. Most everybody uses it.
Secondly, buy the program “Disk Warrior” and run that to make sure all your directories are in top shape. Your FCP problems may be related to your projects losing their association with some media or render files, etc.
Thirdly, Google the system maintenance program called “Cocktail” which does things like getting rid of bloated cache and log files within OS X. Also important for keeping your Mac in top shape. There is more than one system maintenance program out there. Cocktail is just the one I happen to use and it works fine for me. It’s also a freebie. The Mac is Unix based which was originally designed to run 24 7. System maintenance is programmed into the OS and is designed to run in the wee hours of the morning when no one’s using the machine. Trouble is, most people shut their Macs off at night so this little task never gets done. Hence the reason for programs like Cocktail.
Oh, and make sure you use Disk Utility from time to time for repairing the permisions on your startup drive. If you find a lot of corrections listed in the staus window during the permissions repair, run it a second time. Do the permissions thing right after trashing FCP preferences and before using Disk Warrior. Repairing permissions is done on just the startup drive.
All the things mentioned above should be part of an ongoing preventive maintenance routine to avoid what just happened to you.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
[Giant Tarantula] “A lot of the time clicking on the separate angles in the viewer doesn’t allow me to change individual angles, it only moves the green box selecting the separate audio channels?”
In the View menu go to “Multiclip Active Tracks” and make sure “Audio + Video” is selected if you want to cut audio and video at the same time. If you just want to cut the video and have the same audio source untouched then select “Video”.
To be consistent with always having the angles visible in the viewer and the active angle present in the canvas make sure that the playhead sync button (that’s the middle one at the top of the Canvas window) is set to “open”.
Also make sure that “Show Multiclip Overlays” is selected in the View menu.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. There was an issue with FCP 5.1.2 where cross dissolves wouldn’t translate properly between the 2 platforms but that was apparently fixed in 5.1.3. But 5.1.3. brought with it a host of other problems concerning plugins now not working properly on both Intel and Power PC based Macs. So then they brought out FCP 5.1.4. soon after. Some plugins like Colorista (maybe Boris too) and a few others are still having issues. But overall you’re good to go with exchanging files (project and XML) between the platforms.
Others feel free to add additional info about anything I’ve missed.
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
-
I found something at Larry Jordan’s web site that may be a partial answer to the question: ” Why is there a difference in luma and chroma levels after encoding to MPEG2 ?”
Larry states that the process of compression converts your file to a broadcast safe format. This doesn’t address the question of why exporting to MPEG2 within FCP has a different result as opposed to exporting a QT movie and using Compressor as a stand alone app, but the answer may lead to more clues down the road. I’ll continue to research this perplexing issue.
I didn’t know that the act of converting to MPEG2 resuted in a broadcast safe file. Unless I misunderstood Mr. Jordan’s article.
You can read it here (about halfway down the article)
https://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_grfx_look.html
– Don:
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”