[Greg Nosaty]

I use Sonnet Fusion 500p 5 bay raid enclosures and the Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P 4-port SATA II PCIe card. Each port supports port multiplier functionality at 3Gb/s to interface to multiple drives. I work in 720p and 1080i and have no problems with throughput.

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

I give the transcribers, writers and director TCB screeners of the footage. How will they identify the clips they want to use if every single one starts with the same timecode numbers? You have to have continuous ascending code.

when I modify timecode in FCP it changes the media. If I trash it and replace it with the media on my backup drive re reconnects perfectly.

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

Thanks for this John, but I’ve already done all that.

I’ve narrowed the problem down to Motion files that were modified and saved last Friday. Somehow the “ozone” plugin for Motion became corrupted and also corrupted the files that were edited. once I deleted those file from my capture scratch the FCP project opened.

After re-installing Motion I was able to open the files made on Friday and save them again to my FCP capture scratch and reconnect the media.

The really strange thing is that I called a colleague to ask him if he had ever seen this problem before and he said it was a new one on him. Then 4 hours later one of his editors tried to open an archived Motion project and got the same error message. It’s like some spooky Y2K bug that corrupted the ozone plugin all over British Columbia!

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

Thanks for your help and advice Jeremy.

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

Actually I thought the delay in the Kona processing only happened when I ask it to to an up or down convert. You mean that it is always there and I should offset audio for all outputs?

What the mixer said was something went wrong either with the OMF or in his PT session. I’ve heard many audio post guys complain about FCP’s OMF capabilities but in this case I think the biggest part of the sync issue happened manually in ProTools.

“As Aaron touched on, in audio, 23.98 and 29.97 are basically the same” that’s what I thought. The only time my mixers have had to jump through hoops is when I’ve done co-productions with the UK and we have to make NTSC and PAL masters.

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

In Fact there was standard def stock in the show. Some was BetaSP at 29.97 and some was home video in PAL DV of refugee camps in Rwanda. These were up-converted on the cheap with Mpeg Streamclip and a Nattress stands conversion plugin. The footage didn’t look great in the first place but it is in sync. In fact the whole show was in sync in Final Cut. Something happened between OMF export and layback of final mix.

Besides FCP claims to be an “open timeline” where you can drop anything media within the same video standard into the timeline, render and play. But it isn’t that simple. When I have multiple codecs in high and standard def in a project it constantly crashes. When I convert all media to the same def and codec and re-import everything is stable again.

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

Thanks Jeremy, this is a good discussion for me…

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Kona is a great card, I own 2 and wouldn’t buy anything else i’ve seen. My point is if they know there is a one frame delay then why don’t they write it into the drivers code and save me the hassles. anyway…

Thank you for helping me realize that there is more than one issue at work here. When I watch the show in FCP it looks and sounds in sync. it’s not until I bring the stereo mix back into the sequence that you can SEE the sync issue. When you say that “FCP does a bad job of adding pulldown in 29.97 timelines” it all starts to make sense. that is problem number 1. Problem 2 is that I believed that FCP 6 was an “open timeline” and didn’t realize that it meant about the same as “real time effects” Problem 3 is that i didn’t pay attention when the project fell onto my plate. problem 4 is the mixer did some weird voodoo as well.

Here is a bit more background:

This documentary is for the french strand of the CBC, called SRC and Tele Quebec. (I’m in Canada if you haven’t guessed;). They both have fairly stringent quality control and give written reports. One of them requires a seamless 51:37;00 the other a 01:00:00;00 with bumper and commercial blacks. So everything has to match wall clock in 29.97 DF.

They shot on Panasonic P2 and then logged and transfered native DVCPro into FCP, nothing unusual. For online I’ve done things like green screen composites over slomo backgrounds, simple 3 way color correction with broadcast safe filters, lower thirds, alpha channel titles, a credit roll and 2 dissolves. I’ve done lots of shows in 24p and never run across this kind of problem before, but then again I’ve always cut in a native timeline.

To trouble shoot this problem i’ve gone back to the original “picture locked” sequence and I’ve imported the stereo mix from audio post, matched the 2 pop, and compared the production dialogue with the mix and that’s when you hear the variation in the delay. Then I compared it to the guide track from the Quicktime movie that the mixer imported into his protools session and it match the FCP sequence perfectly. The wild card was the Protools mix because everything that came from FCP worked was in sync.

I don’t ever want to go through this again and the only way to prevent it is to understand how it happened in the first place. But I’m still not clear how the original 23.98 audio can be laid back to a picture that has been pulled down to 29.97 DF if there is no pulldown added to the audio.

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

I know Kona can’t keep audio in sync. I think it’s ridiculous that I have to manually offset sound that should be in sync in the first place. I pay for the flagship video card for FCP and I have to create the offset? The competition has figured out how to delay picture to match their processing time, Why can’t AJA?

But I don’t do 23.98 output to 29.97 or 59.94. I send an OMF to a mix house. Nor do I output the final 5.1 mix from my Final Cut suite so I don’t respect the pulldown processing time. The broadcasters require Dolby encoding which I can’t do in house so I output picture to Panasonic HD and I send it to another facility. They take my tape and the Mix from the audio house and do a DVCpro HD to HDSR transfer with Dolby layback of the 5.1 mix and closed captioning.

In my output the Kona does the pulldown to 29.97 but the mix house has 48K 16bit audio that was recorded on a camera shooting at 24p. Is it just magic that I change the frame rate and the original audio is supposed to match?

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

Thanks Shane

I normally edit in the format and frame rate the footage shot in and let my Kona 3 do all the heavy lifting. The broadcasters usually require 1080i at 29.97 with Dolby encoded 5.1 outputs to Sony HDSR. Many productions I work on choose to shoot 24p for the “pulldown” look even though they know the final deliver is usually 1080i 29.97 or occasionally 720p 59.94. I output the OMF and send it to the mix house and let them do their magic.

In this case I didn’t edit this show I just did the picture online and I didn’t question the workflow to that point. The post house doing the layback and captioning encode to Sony HDSR noticed the sync issues. Frankly, It wasn’t until then that I even noticed the media was 23.98 in a 29.97 timeline (i know, I know, what were you thinking!). But I thought if that was the problem the sync would consistently drift further out, but that was not the case here. It went in and out of sync through the whole show. Plus the mixer told me that the OMF and the Quicktime reference movie with TC burn that he received were all 29.97. So it didn’t make sense

Besides many people tell me they use FCP to do their pulldown so I would assume that FCP would pulldown the audio as well. I know differently now.

So I understand what I have to do on the picture end of the equation. What I don’t know, and have never asked any mixers or layback techs, is how does pulldown get added to the final audio mix as it gets laid back to HDSR?

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc

[Greg Nosaty]

The fix I found was to move my Log and Transfer window from my right monitor (or control monitor) to the left one. It is consistent, when I move it back I get the “file structure” warning and it will not work. Move it back and everything is fine.

give it a shot, as silly as this may sound!

cheers,
Greg Nosaty

Cinemontage Productions Inc