[Jaap Verdenius]

That’s right, this is a way to get the job done without a timeline.

I guess you can find another filter that can do the job better than what I suggested – but I don’t know.

Mask Shape is an effect (look in Effects > Matte) – for your purpose you need to select ‘invert’ in the settings, you can tweak horizontal and vertical scale and move it to the position you want through ‘center’.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Sorry I disappointed you Lisa – I am going to give it another try then:

– Import your file into FCP.
– Open it in the Viewer (no timelines involved)
– Drop a Effect>Video>Timecode Generator onto the clip in the viewer
– In the filter settings make sure that font color and back color are the same (so you can’t see the digits anymore) and adjust size and position
– Select the clip in the browser and do File>Export>Quicktime Movie with “self-contained” selected

Alternatively you could drop in a Matte>Mask Shape instead of the TC Generator, so you have more options to tweak the shape – but the color will be constrained to black.

This is really a workaround, but I just tried it and it works, and you seem to be in a hurry.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

I am not sure if this is of any help as it may solve your problem only partially.

You probably need to turn on “Auto Conform Sequences”. Go to User Preferences, to the tab Editing; the itme is in the lower right corner. Select “Ask”.
Then create a new empty sequence (its settings are irrelevant) and drop your clip at the start. FCP will popup a message that the clip doesn’t match the sequence settings and if it should change sequence settings accordingly. Select “yes”. You will have the right settings of the clip in your sequence, and then you can apply your matte and export a self-contained QT with that settings.

Now the reason why I am hesitating is that I don’t know if FCP will recognize your 18fps clip as 18fps on import. It may interpret it as 25 fps. I don’t know how to change that.
But perhaps you may simply go along as if that frame rate is irrelevant and when you export using Quicktime Conversion you can reapply the 18fps framerate… Hope it will work!

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Hold the Alt button while you drag the audio in the timeline.
Or use shift-L to unlink the selection of video/audio clips in the timeline

[Jaap Verdenius]

Perhaps you have a different output to video.

Go to Audio/Video Settings, tab A/V Devices and see that “Different Output for Edit to Tape/Print to Video is unchecked.
NB You can see and hear your program when you scroll through the timeline, so probably your Playback Output settings are just right for printing to video.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Hi Anne,

“Firewire Basic” is a Device Control Preset. Apparently it is working correctly, as you can start and stop the tape from the Capture window.
How about your Capture Preset, is it DV PAL 48 kHz (with or without anamorphic) ? Go to Audio/Video Settings and check it – it’s the 2nd item from above.
About Capture Now: Perhaps you did things in the wrong order. Your have to run the tape before pressing “Capture Now”.

That’s all I can think of…

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Speed changes in FCP often cause a problem with interlace. Unticking blending may help, but it really depends on what you do. Any change in one of the basic motion parameters can get you into trouble.

Perhaps a different workflow may help. Did you try to apply the speed change in Motion (apply behavior>retiming>set speed), export the QT and then do the rest of your work in FCP?

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Shane,

There’s only one media drive, a Lacie 1TB FW800, so it’s a fairly simple setup (see also first message in the thread).
I suspected this LaCie, so I cloned this drive to a GTech Raid, reconnected media; the same things happened. The GTech is really brand new.
I took the LaCie to another CPU; same things happened, more or less (see earlier in this thread). I seemed my Octomac did a bit better than the 2×2.66Dual, but not flawless to say the least.

I have been doing longform for years, HDV, SD (all PAL) but I never had a project with so many media files and I never ran into this kind of problem. That’s why I am really curious this made be run into a limitation of the software of any kind.

You say it could be a lot of factors, can you mention a few? Perhaps I could check some more things. This project still has to be finished, anything that could prevent the crashes and speed up the process would be worth exploring

Oh yes, I do have the project file on my media disk. I thought it was bad practice to put it on your system disk. Or did I get this wrong? Anyway, it never brought me into a problem in the last 4 years.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Right, that was the point I was wondering about: If the 4 GB memory limit is a problem for FCP, in other words if a project can become too large for it to handle, in particular if the number of (references to) media files gets too large.
It would be good to know because if THAT is the problem it is also clear that splitting the project into subprojects is indeed the way to go.

By the way, I checked most of the points that were made earlier in this thread; but the disks are not daisychained; actually there is only one, it is 60% full and its measured read/write speed averages 60 MB/sec; there are no other peripherals that might drag performance down; and both systems are really fresh and new. In short, there is no simple explanation (except the corrupt file, but how to verify/falsify corruption…?)

Jaap

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

I reported an issue with the first first frame on insert having a duplicated field with BMD in May – don’t know if that is the inaccuracy you are talking about, but
anyway they fixed it in the 6.6 driver. I just tested it on a Multibridge today. It took them a few months, but it is solved.

Aja has its own inaccuracies. Last week I found that Capture Offset on the PAL SD device control cannot be adjusted correctly. Probably a problem of how the driver talks to FCP, as their own VTRXChange application doesn’t have it.

Jaap