[Joel Granholm]

To have FCPX use media handles for transitions (like FCP7 does) instead of sliding clips, open Preferences and go to the Editing tab, then, under “Transitions”, make sure “Apply transitions using” is set to “Available Media”.

All transitions applied to clips with audio will (or should) result in a crossfade on the audio, regardless of which transition it is.

There are two ways you can manually fade the audio of a clip in & out:

1) Use the audio “Fade” handles: When you mouse over the audio, you’ll see a round handle at the beginning and end of the clip. You simply drag these to set the duration of the fade. You can control-click a Fade handle to chose the shape of the curve for the fade.

2) Keyframe the audio level: Choose Show Audio Animation under the Clip menu (Ctrl-A), then you can option-click the volume control (the black line) to add keyframes.

If your audio is in a video clip but you want to apply a transition only to the audio, you can do one of the following:

1) Expand the clips (Ctrl-S) then extend the audio in/out points of each clip so they overlap, then manually fade the audio for each clip. You can collapse the clips again when you’re done.

2) Split the clips (Cmd-Shift-G) to separate the audio from video, then bring the audio clips together in a secondary storyline (Cmd-G), then apply a transition to them to get the cross fade (Cmd-T). This will be the faster option for applying to several clips, but the audio & video link for the clips will be broken.

However you do it, I would say the most important step is to send feedback to Apple to try to get them to give us back our proper cross-fades.

[Joel Granholm]

You might also check out Video Copilot’s Twitch plug-in for After Effects. It makes it easier to randomize (or “twitch”) a variety of parameters all at once.

https://www.videocopilot.net/products/twitch/

-Joel

[Joel Granholm]

If you have After Effects, I would suggest using that to down-convert to SD. In my experience, Compressor tends to overly pixelate interlaced footage when it down-converts, but After Effects does a very clean job. Just make sure you have the Separate Fields option set correctly in the Interpret Footage dialog and that you separate fields appropriately in the Render Settings. I would recommend rendering with ProRes, Lossless or Uncompressed.

Also, if you have chapter markers, I would duplicate your 1080i sequence, delete the clips in the timeline, set the Sequence Settings to your target SD settings, then drop your After Effects render into the timeline. Then just export a reference QuickTime with DVD Studio Pro markers to drop into Compressor.

-Joel

[Joel Granholm]

If you have After Effects, I would suggest using that to down-convert to SD. In my experience, Compressor tends to overly pixelate interlaced footage when it down-converts, but After Effects does a very clean job. Just make sure you have the Separate Fields option set correctly in the Interpret Footage dialog and that you separate fields appropriately in the Render Settings. I would recommend rendering with ProRes, Lossless or Uncompressed.

Also, if you have chapter markers, I would duplicate your 1080i FCP sequence, delete the clips in the duplicated timeline, set the Sequence Settings to your target SD settings, then drop your After Effects render into the timeline. Then just export a reference QuickTime with DVD Studio Pro markers to drop into Compressor.

[Joel Granholm]

I’ve been having the same problem on my MBP 17″ Hi-res 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM using an external eSATA RAID.

This is absolutely not normal behavior as this is the only machine we have that does this. Also, this happens even with progressive video. This is also not a FCP problem: I’ve experienced the same playback problem in After Effects previews and in QuickTime Player.

Our machines range from Dual G5s to 8-core Intels, all using various Apple Cinema displays, and also a MBP 15″, and none of them display this symptom in the canvas, regardless of whether the canvas is zoomed in at 100% or any other size.

Meanwhile, the MBP 17″ gets the screen tear regardless of whether the canvas is at 100% or any other setting, whether it is displayed on the built-in display or an external (DVI) display.

I looked into getting a Matrox MXO for this computer as a possible work-around, but that device is apparently still not compatible with this model of laptop: It produces screen tearing, too. (Of course, this machine meets all the system requirements, but after reading their support forums, I found out many people are having problems using it with this model).

I had also hoped that it was just a problem with the logic board, but we recently had that replaced for another issue, and the screen tearing is still happening.

The really frustrating part is that our MBP 15″ with a slower processor, half the RAM and a slower graphics card outperforms the ultimate beast of MacBook Pros when it comes to something as simple as playing video. So, until this problem is fixed, we have to take the MBP 17″ onsite for editing, but still bring the MBP 15″ for playback.