Harry Bromley-davenport
2
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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How long is the piece you need to have de-noised and what size is the audio file? Would you be able to upload it to Dropbox? If it is not too long or difficult I will do it for you. So why don’t you upload one continuous file of the BAD AUDIO ONLY and I will give it a shot.
Harry.
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Do you still need help with this? I have Izotope RX-2 Advanced which will help this a lot. Respond if you are still in trouble.
Harry.
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You say “any advice is appreciated”, so try these guys. It will cost you nothing for a test:
https://aeroquartet.com/movierepair/pricing.
They have rescued stuff for me twice over the past 5 years.
Here’s how it works:
You email them and explain your problem.
They email you back (very promptly) with a tiny little program which sniffs around your files and finds out what’s wrong. You run the program and send the resulting file back to them.
If they can fix it, you pay. If not, there is no charge.
The guy’s name is Benôit.
You have nothing to lose.
Heartfelt best wishes to you – and please let me/us know if this works out for you. I was skeptical, but this guy got it done – and at a very reasonable price. They are in Spain but speak perfect English.
Harry.
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Nope. Sorry I can’t help.
Harry.
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I have had two good experiences with these people who are (or were) based in Spain:
https://aeroquartet.com/movierepair/repair.
They are reasonably priced too. All the info is on their site, in English, and it’s easy to follow.
The drill is that they send you a tiny little application which you run on your messed up files. Then you email them the results. They then tell you if they can fix it. If so, you pay them via PayPal or Credit Card. Then they email you a program set up to run specifically on your files. You run it. Done.
They saved my bacon twice and I had precisely your problem. It was all done within 24 hours. Phew!
Best,
Harry.
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Oh, Nick,
The more you write, the more my suspicion increases that a new Internal System Drive is in the cards. I realize that this involves expense. But sometimes you have to put new tires on your car. You are apparently suffering terribly right now and I fear that you will continue to stick band aids all over a house which needs new foundations.
Why don’t you try un-installing and reinstalling first? Then you can confront the possible expense of a new drive.
All those wacky messages that FCP is throwing up are screaming at me that FCP is attempting to pull stuff off your drives while those drives are not delivering the goods on time. So FCP just despairs and either crashes or vomits up bizarre messages in desperation.
And I assure you that upgrading to FCP 7 will not fix this. I just know it. I can smell it. I am running OS 10.6.7 and FCP 6.0.6 which, on my setup, is now stable. Installing Snow Leopard on a totally fresh drive appears to me to be the way to go. You say: “Internal boot drive is the same I believe.” You really should check this.
You ask about a hard drive diagnostic program. I think that you are living in the hope that such a program will inform you of where the problem lies. It probably will not and I fear that you will be wasting your time and increasing your aggravation level.
I wish you well.
Harry.
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How horrible for you.
I have precisely the same computer and setup as you, but I am on Snow Leopard.
I’m assuming that you are using FCP and not FCPX.
If you have worked a lot in FCP you will be aware that render files have always had a nasty habit of occasionally disappearing and that attempting to reconnect them is a fool’s errand. This is an old FCP problem that was never fixed. But it’s an occasional fault and should not happen on the massive scale which you describe.
You have done absolutely everything that I would have done except that you have not un-installed FCP and then reinstalled it. That would be a good idea. There’s a tiny little program which is free from DIGITAL REBELLION. It’s called FCP Remover. Here is the link:
https://support.digitalrebellion.com/fcsremover/
So that’s what I would do next.
If that doesn’t work, you should consider moving into more drastic territory: have you recently been suffering from other non-FCP files disappearing or other nasty misbehavior within your Mac? Perhaps your drive/s are teetering on the brink of self-destruction.
1. I wonder if your drives are 5400rpm or 7200rpm?
2. You say: “Scratch disk is on an external G-Raid, and are being written to the hard drive … “. I hope you are not using your system drive to store your render files. Are you? If you are, you must stop that and change the render file destination folder to any drive other than your system drive. This is an imperative.
3. I wonder how old your internal and external drives are … ? This leads me to tell you of a revelation I had about a year ago. I had old 5400rpm internal drives which were born in 2007. I was using G-Raid external drives. FCP was crashing increasingly so, in desperation, I bought three new 7200rpm 3TB INTERNAL drives. They cost about $180 each. I started from the ground up – I had no choice really – and used one drive as the system drive, the second for media files and the third for render files and other stuff like exports.
My problems ceased immediately. My life changed. I fired my psychiatrist and released the small children I was torturing.
So perhaps your internal drives are old and geriatric and run at 5400rpm. Or perhaps they have, for some other reason, gone bad. In any event, it seems as if you have tried pretty much everything except the replacement of hardware.
I reckon that it is possible that, due to age and/or low speed, your drives may not be able to keep up with demand.
In any event, that was my experience and I hope it may be useful to you.
Best wishes,
Harry The Idiot.
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Dear Mr. Hargrave,
If I were you, I would sync and edit at 24 (or 23.976 if we are splitting hairs) and convert the end result to PAL 25.
I work here in Hollywood in 23.976 progressive HD and, when finished, high-tail it to a small local post production facility for the final master output and the conversion to PAL HD 25 progressive.
As for the best system to use for the final conversion, I wonder if you use Teranex convertors in the UK. This is a real-time standards conversion hardware box of tricks which would normally be available at a mastering facility. If not Teranex, there clearly has to be something similar used in the UK.
If you are not massively knowledgeable or confident with Compressor, Cinema Tools and the like, I would stay away from attempting this conversion yourself because your broadcaster’s Quality Control department will toss it back at you for the slightest infraction of standards. Here in Los Angeles, there are hits out on those QC guys.
I have found that it’s well worth the relatively low cost of having my work converted by someone who does this all day and really knows their onions. There are all sorts of wacky things that can go wrong and which you personally may not notice, but which even a moderately priced facility will avoid.
Re: your last question: my movies get converted from 24p NTSC HD to 25p PAL HD all the time. One can set the Teranex (or similar) to convert your film so that you do not get a double frame once per second, which would look nasty, and so that the film retains the same running time. I know that sounds impossible. Just believe me.
Stop worrying. Cut the film at 24 and do all the audio at 24. Then totter round to your local friendly post production house and throw yourself at them.
Best wishes,
Harry.
But I
Best,
Harry.
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Thank you for your advice.
Harry.
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I managed to considerably reduce this black striping effect by crushing the blacks using the 3 Way Color Corrector. Try it – pull that black slider way down and the black stripes sorta get lost – at least partially.
Best
Harry.