Marc Israel
Forum Replies Created
-
p.s. Mark
“However it happened, if clicking on the shot, going into the “motion” tab and and undoing any and all pre-applied scaling and other effects doesn’t bring it up to size, it’s something you’re going to have to manually re-scale, if you insist on using the existing shot. For every such clip. ”
It is not a question of changing the size or scale of the clip I don’t think. When I changed the sequence settings as per David’s suggestion, the dimensions of the canvas itself changed, creating that letterbox-like look as seen in the photo I affixed. -
Fellows, I had to take a little break/space from this today as I am having trouble containing my exasperation over this present issue and the various possible hardships that lay ahead. I am hearing different things from different people, namely the two of you. Mark, my namesake, and David, name of my only brother. Ominous notions have floated such as an imminent system drive failure, bad sectors (what could sound worst then “bad sectors”?…even though I don’t know what sectors are), a outdated and/or corrupted application, sequence settings all wrong. One of you are so assured of the problem you are are ready for me to accept your gospel word and employ untold new work hours into fixing sequence settings despite the fact that I’ve had no issue at all with the settings for ages, and, if by chance, he is wrong and the problem persists, or I learn eventually through some Parallel Universe Entity that an easier solution was available all along, and that I was a victim of jumping-the gun, I will want to kill him, despite ideals of pacifism.
Mark, your language makes me laugh. “Stain on a canyon wall,” and your pep on passion projects is in all aspect received harmonious and in spirit…with well, the spirit of this film itself, which once was a fiction film that suffered so many setbacks it finally had to be forsaken or face the men w/ the butterfly nets. But have now come back to it years later and see it in a new light – that it is in fact a documentary about, among other things, the hardships, tests, travails, and failures about trying to complete that desperate film, mishaps so monumental their amusement value just might be deserving of a feature-length film to fully express, although by now it’s a film of myriad themes and sub-plots as well.
“The question I have for you now though is: what’s the hurry, all of a sudden, that you can’t go back and do it right? “
The scope of this project is huge, as in HUMONGOUS. It far outweighs any feature-length film I’ve made regarding volume of clips, number of sequences, in tightness and density of editing, not to mention storyline, cast of “characters”, scenes, etc. I also have often edited this film in a controlled, yet spontaneous way, whereby sometimes feel like I’m almost painting as much as editing. And the film is only a third finished. And yet it was almost 2 years of work. And no I’m not bragging, what I’m saying or asking is am I gonna take the word of one or both of you and put myself through unspeakable tedium revising all these sequence settings….or…gasp…start from scratch on a new app and create all these same exact edits, thousands of minutely-honed in IN and Out points, replicate the exact seconds of cross-dissolves or some other carefully chosen transition, the color correction of each of thousands of clips on these painting-like frames??? eek gadd gadd god help me…or even more torturous, to reimport footage? choke choke cough cough that is to cruel andIi can barely breathe due to the daunting prospect and horror, which I’d surely never survive in one piece. Really. I can only “go back” so far. Otherwise I will simply not be able to maintain a daily schedule or eating and sleeping. I will turn to slop, I will run naked in the streets twirling my dirty underwear and shouting obscenities. Every man has his breaking point.
It remains to be seen what I will, in fact, do. It will be something, that’s for sure. Because time in the old ticker is ticking, yes the doc has bad news, and every day spent in limbo on this is the sound of screeching bats echoing through my skull.
David, I’m in Los Angeles. Why do you ask?
-
“Please, just stick to the here and now, I don’t really care about all your previous attempts to fix stuff, that’s the past, when you were unsure about what to do.” David, with all due respect, the ”past” you refer to is, in good measure, what has happened the last 3 days since the original thread. That’s not here and now? But I don’t want to quibble, an instead make use of whatever you have to offer and are offering. So, onwards…
As mentioned, I cut and pasted an old sequence into a new sequence with the settings you recommended. The photo I affixed shows the result. It’s basically like a form of letterboxing. It’s a square frame with the widescreen footage set in the center with blackness on the top and bottom to compensate for the different shapes (square vs rectangle). This is the first roadblock I immediately ran into. There’s others, but unless I can straighten this one out, I’m stuck.
-
I’m well-aware of your initial message, it’s what instructed me (how) to do the experiment last night. I was showing the photo of the canvas to explain the actual snag I hit, and hoping someone like you could explain how to troubleshoot. because I can’t. I appreciate your input, but in my last couple responses to you I’ve been asking about my particular project and how it relates to your diagnosis, which would help me understand and feel more assured that this is, in fact, the only explanation and that you’re considering the minute particulars. I’m glad you helped thousands of people but that doesn’t go as far as hearing a practical response/explanation about the First Aid, the temporary fix, the retraumatization by recreating the rendering scenario, why there’s been virtually ZERO problems until now (and zero problems again when I run First Aid), etc. I can’t just automatically go on blind faith, turn over my powers of reason to someone even if they obviously have lots more experience. But I would love to get your take on what I keep mentioning. Simultaneously, I AM beginning to experiment with changing the settings, in case I take your advice full throttle, and I have already hit a big snag, which I mentioned, and would love to get a practical fix for it, because otherwise I am stuck there too.
-
I just spent awhile taking David’s suggestion making a new sequence to settings of Pro Res 422, square pixels, and copy and paste everything from the current timeline. There’s a couple immediate problems. Firstly, the widescreen clips get this big square black border on top and bottom.
Hopefully you can see a photo of it here:12965_screenshot20181219at1.37.39am.png.zip
No matter what I choose for pixel aspect ratio, it doesn’t give me a plain widescreen across the whole screen.
Also, any clips I had made larger or cropped are out of whack too, taking up odd aspect ratios overlaid on the square backdrop.
Have I done something wrong? -
I hope I am not the movie you see in your mind. But perhaps I’m in denial. and that ships already set sail and now sinking in the harbor. In any case I can’t jump ship.
I’m hoping some underwater monster comes up for air and while doing so happens to bring the ship back up on its head just before I drownIt’s not for nostalgia reasons. This is a film project I started nine years ago, a sweeping epic documentary, one which I worked on for two years, then gave it up on, but now am coming back to with fresh vigor and a whole new angle and more footage. And what I have to start again with is practically half the film already made, or at least a very rough draft. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of fine-toothed editing. To start again on another system would essentially be to lose all those hours and need to re-clock just as many before even beginning to tackle the whole revision, which, in itself, will take another several hundreds of hours. So see? I can’t. Just can’t. But I will promise you I’ll jump ship once this project is done. Then, I’ll be ready for the future. For now, I’m married to FCP 7 no matter what grief she gives me.
Regards my FCP 7, I think it’s bell jarred pretty well, the whole package was just transferred via time machine, no updates.
-
David, thanks for chiming in again. The fix you gave is very welcome as an idea and possible or probable solution, but, because I have never, ever had any issues whatsoever with these sequence settings, including other entirely finished film projects…and because of the dreaded prospect of having to reformat an entire project with thousands of files, about 50 different extended sequences, several micro-projects within the larger project, etc and hope that everything syncs up without creating some other issue(s) in the process…I think it could be understandable that I haven’t been yet ready so far to declare your fix gospel and execute it. Also the advice to run disk utility seemed to led to an entire fix of the project, temporarily, until I recreated the circumstances for the issue again. I am wondering if you can elaborate on why you think the sequence settings is the problem here given the First Aid fix, the issue re-surfacing due to rendering one heavily effect-ed clip, and also given that I have had zero issues with the project for a couple years on/off until now, not to mention other fully completed projects with identical sequence settings for several years now.
There could be a lot of background tech understanding I’m just missing here, because I don’t have a firm grasp of that stuff and how it all relates and interrelates…
Also, if I were to change all the sequence settings, can you give me some idea of what extra muscle I should expect to have flex…like, you mentioned resizing clips – is that something I can do in a batch fashion, maybe using “paste attributes” for example? Should I expect expect to run into any snags or you think it’s a pretty cut and dry procedure? Also, why does FCP create these outdated sequence settings for me automatically when I plop down any of the original HV30 footage into the timeline? Why doesn’t it default to pro-res settings instead, for example?
-
Mark, again, I really appreciate your input, as am otherwise seemingly alone in sorting this. So thanks for your time and energy. I hear you and others that codec choice and whatnot are not optimal, but again, no trouble at all until this week, and seems all somehow centered around that one render clip that clearly triggers and traumatizes the Mac or FCP brain. But perhaps something to deeply consider switching up regardless of it’s the culprit before I get even much further into the belly of the beast of this project projected to take another 8 months of daily work before complete. Assets protected, check. I’d still like to hear what should yank from under the hood? Songs, films, applications? I just ran AVG cleaner…
“Has *anything* happened in or around this system between when you were running okay and when it started going bad? “
A new MBPro as of two months ago, and yes used a time machine backup from old MBP so that all apps were on new one. All scratch and other FCP files were stored externally. There was something I noticed initially when using FCP at some point, trying to do a particular edit, whereby I think it mentioned the graphics card?…some dialog box never got with the old Mac. One week ago started using brand new Lacie Rugged Road drive with Thunderbolt (first time ever) instead of usual USB. No power surges. A few days ago downloaded Get Bacupk 2RE + MacUpdate desktop and used them to update backups from one drive to another. Absolutely no sprinkled chicken blood, haha, have been without since local sorcery store ran dry… -
I’m wondering if I should (re)create the problem first (by trying to render that one clip)…so that when I run DU it will have something to fix otherwise already fixed? I’m a little nervous now to do anything that might upset further the Mac’s nervous system…Did the info I gave about HD space help shed any light any in terms of diagnosing imminent system drive failure, bad sectors, no room for swap files?
-
Got 138 GB left on a 500 GB. Sadly, neither time did I notice what message DU gave. It didn’t stop, just mentioned repairing or fixing something I believe, than onwards to fix.