[Karim Zouak]

A good article, but maybe it would be good to add a bit on responding to messages, too? Sometimes I’ve had very helpful replies, and other times I’ve had people so interested in showing off their answering ability that they answered some other question, just mixing in a couple key words from my question.

Karim Zouak

[Karim Zouak]

I had that problem briefly, too, but it went away after I trashed preferences….

good luck,
-karim

[Karim Zouak]

Hi,

I’m currently assisting on 4 features in FCP. Everything is fine except for 2 major problems:
1. The media manager problem that has been described on MacWorld + groups like this, where the program will mess up time-varied clips and still frames.

2. Unexpected playback errors, that are only fixed by deleting all of the renders with render manager. Sometimes audio or video clips just play the wrong media. This can add huge amounts of time to making an output, but appears to be the only way of being sure that playback is correct.

-karim

[Karim Zouak]

Hi, Wayne;

I’ve been working with the latest version of FCP 5 and OS X, on several feature-length projects, and have regularly found media manager to have unexpected problems. The only “fail-safe” that I can imagine would be to export an EDL or XML and hold on to that… any media manager creation could have problems that you won’t discover for some time.

-karim

[Karim Zouak]

I have been doing a series of features on daisy-chained firewire 800 Lacie 1 TB drives with minimum amounts of trouble, even using the DVCPRO HD codec. I definitely would avoid working with a timeline longer than the standard 20minute reel length, and only keep the timelines open that you absolutely need — each additional open timeline hogs active memory. Also, keep your browser contents as sparse as possible. If you have a stack of bins you only need under certain circumstances, considering keeping those in a second project that you can open/close as needed.

good luck
-karim

[Karim Zouak]

I agree — DVCPRO HD should be totally fine. What kind of disk are you capturing to? Firewire 400 will be too slow. Firewire 800 is not recommended, but I’ve never experienced any trouble with it.

-karim

[Karim Zouak]

I’ve had similar problems before, and I believe it was caused by a pre-comp that was a different frame rate than my final comp — I had one set to 29.97 and the other to 30 fps.

Karim Zouak

[Karim Zouak]

No, it started in FCP 5.0.2.

In asking around, a colleague of mine mentioned that he has experienced similar problems with 20 minute (and over) sequences… he has come to expect FCP to randomly reassign footage when you’ve had the job running for a couple of months. He never found a solution for it.

Guess I’ll give Apple a call on monday… I’ll post to this thread if I get either a solution or a caveat.

-karim

Karim Zouak

[Karim Zouak]

thanks for responding.

>Have you tried to select the audio clip only and Remove Attributes?

There are no attributes applied… it’s just a single layer of plain clips with no effects or modifications applied.

To my lovely joy, this problem has also creeped into the picture!

-karim

[Karim Zouak]

I’m having the exact same problem. I’m assisting on a series of features, and 2 of our 4 workstations are starting to exhibit this problem. (All using the current updates of OS and FCP 5, 48khz timeline, DVCPRO HD 1080p picture).

The audio has been digitized correctly, there are no nested sequences, no effects, nothing other than a straight insert — and spontaneously, the audio recuts itself without any rhyme or reason. Basically, the clip reassigns itself a new remix of the original media, so people may repeat dialogue or spit out a series of unrelated syllables.

I have found that using render manager to delete the sequence’s render files will fix the problem, but of course I wish it wouldn’t happen in the first place. I wasn’t expecting this to fix anything, because the audio in question didn’t need rendering, but when you stumble on a solution….

Anybody have more information on this?

-karim