[Grant Higginson]

Hi Hadaska,
Sorry for the ridiculously late reply. I’m starting to think it could be hardware based. It’s only happening on one machine – myh newest machine. It doesn’t happen on any projects on my MBP or on my older 24 inch iMac. I thought I had fixed the problem by creating a new user account. This worked fine for about 2 months then it randomly started happening again. So I created another user account and it worked fine but only for about 3 days then the problem happened again!. I am using a 2TB lacie hard drive with firewire 800 as my scratch disk for the vision but the audio files are on the actual computer hard disk. (I’ll try putting them onto the same drive as the vision and see if that helps but I think I might have tried that when I was experiencing the problem in the past.

I have no idea how audio hardware works but I’m guessing it could be a problem with the sound card in the newer iMac. I’m guessing it’s not in all of the iMacs of this model as I haven;t heard of anyone else having the same problem.

[Grant Higginson]

Yeah mate, it’s all 24 bit 48khz. It’d definitely happened since running a software update and installing FCPX. I am now running SL 10.6.8.

Do you know what the best way of getting back to my old setup is? Do i need to completely wipe my hard drive and start from scratch? I don’t even want FCPX on my machine as I don’t use it at all. I just need to get back to that previous version of Snow Leopard. Is that even possible?

[Grant Higginson]

Thanks for the response,
After hours of trying to fix it, it just randomly started working again. Was fine for a few days but then today I was faced with the same problem. This time it was before I had even added and footage to the timeline. I just added the voiceover for the TV commercial and it was playing back in slow motion. My Activity Monitor says I still have over half of my RAM free so it’s not a lagging issue with playback.

The file was a wav file so I opened it with QT and exported it as an aiff with all the correct settings but even that had the same playback issues. I finally decided to upgrade to 7.0.3 (not sure why it took me this long) and I was hoping that would fix it but NOPE!

This is driving me CRAZY! I HATE unexplainable problems!

[Grant Higginson]

Hi, did you ever manage to fix this problem? I’m having the exact same issue now with FCP7. It will work fine for ages and then nothing. Or it will playback left channel then right channel the next time I hit play. I have tried deleting my preferences and that doesn’t help.

I had another problem that you didn’t mention (only happens every now and then) during playback the audio would play left & right out of sync or the audio would playback in slow motion – even on the exported video so it’s not an actual playback issue. It’s really pissing me off!

[Grant Higginson]

Hi Zak,
Thanks for your response. I found out since posting that this was from an older version of motion. I’m sure your method would work fine.

What I ended up doing was grouping the layers and animating them in the 3d space. I was initially having trouble with the layer being on top of the other as it turned so I couldn’t see the “page” on the opposite side. I ended up just turning off the cover layer at the frame where it would be behind the other page (I hope that makes sense). There is probably a simpler way like the one you explained. I haven’t done anything with cameras in motion yet though.