[Jeff Kirkland]

The diagonal lines simply mean that you are editing inside a copy (instance) of a compound clip that isn’t using all the available media.

It’s been a long day so I might not be explaining this well but..

When you create a compound clip a ‘master’ version exists in the event library and you can use instances of it on your project timeline. In the project you may not be using the entire compound clip and if you open the compound from within your project you will see diagonal lines indicating what parts of the full length compound clip aren’t being used in your project.

In your case you added five minutes to the compound clip making it 25 minutes long but the copy in use in your project is still set to only be 20 minutes long. You need to go back to the project and drag it out to the new length.

If you opened the ‘master version’ of that compound clip in the event library instead of from within the project you wouldn’t see any diagonal lines because you’re looking at the complete clip.

Hope that made sense…

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

If you open up the background tasks window you can at least get a vague idea of what it’s rendering.

The things that spring to mind are:

1. delete all the project’s render files and let it start again – something may have corrupted and it’s off in an infinite loop.

2. Try copying the timeline into a new project – probably that would achieve the same as point 1 but you never know…

3. If there are compound clips in the project, particularly compound clips nested in other compound clips weird voodoo can happen so you might try breaking them all apart and seeing if that helps.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

I was under the impression FCPX just does it automagically when you drop the footage in a 24p timeline? If I remember rightly there were posts that it looked sub-par on the screen but exported properly.

I’m in a PAL country but it seems to handle 24p in a 50i stream from my ATOMOS Ninja ok.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

So to get it straight, if you get info on the clip outside of FCPX it says it’s 1920×1080 or 1440×1080?

And creating a 1440×1080 project inside FCPX doesn’t help?

When you created the new project did you try selecting the clips and playing with the Spatial Conform setting to see if that changed anything?

Sounds a bit like the pixel aspect ratio flags weren’t set right by whatever captured the footage. There are apps like QT Edit that can re-write the flags without having to re-encode the clips.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

If you’re sure it’s not being slowed down by an effect you’ve added somewhere then I’d suggest moving the project to a different hard drive to see if maybe your hard drive is failing. You could try a different drive cable – it’s not impossible for a cable to go a bit ‘weird’. You might also try trashing FCPX’s preferences, or completely re-installing the app.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

FCPX has to rewrap the AVCHD footage in order to play it so it has to make a copy somewhere and that somewhere is always going to be the Events folder.

Otherwise you can use something like ClipWrap to create the rewrapped files outside of FCPX.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Thanks Andreas, that was perfect timing. I was just wondering how I could create a list of files used in a project and there was your post 🙂

Cheers
Jeff K

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Older versions of FCP came from the days when people actually used tape. With FCPX, support for capturing from tape is a bit of an afterthought.

iMovie captures DV digitally, the same as any other capture app. That’s ones and zeroes to the hard drive – I’m not sure how it would affect the quality of your capture. Better yet, FCPX can directly import your iMovie project so you can capture in iMove, open the iMovie project in FCPX and you’re good to go.

iMovie does capture DV in a marginally different format than FCP but the quality will be identical.

I personally use Live Capture Plus but looking at the CatDV website, I don’t think they sell it any more.

I think iDive from Aquafadas still supports DV capture.

~Jeff K

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

You have no direct control over the capture settings. FCPX might respect the settings of the current project but as I said, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I suspect you will have to capture using some other software then import into FCPX from there.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

File>New Project>Custom>Audio Sample Rate>32Khz

Of course, that might not change the capture settings. FCPX doesn’t have a great deal of support for old cameras. You could try capturing with something else, like Quicktime for instance…

Cheers
Jeff K

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland