[Matt Lyon]

You could try a noise gate filter (often just called a “gate” filter). But how well it works is highly dependent on the the contents of the audio you are trying to fix.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Thanks for the clarification Joe, I think I understand now.

I /think/ FCP can do what you are describing, but you’d have to test. It would probably work something like this:

Digitize the 10 min clip and apply timecode.

Import the ALE into Cinema Tools. This would create an event for each take.

Export a batch list from CT into FCP.

This would create a bunch of offline clips in FCP. You can then force relink them to the roll length quicktime. As long as the timecode in the ALE match the TC you stamped upon redigitizing, FCP will figure out which regions of the master quicktime correspond to each clip from the batch list.

You can then sync the audio. Then you can synchronize FCP with the CTDB and it /should/ apply the correct audio reel timecodes to the events in the database. (As long as the audio files have the correct timecode metadata to begin with, of course).

I haven’t personally ever tried this workflow, but this is how I could see it playing out on paper. Definitely you’d need to do some tests! Very curious to know if you succeed!

A problem with working this way is that the clips you are left with in FCP will probably still show huge handles, corresponding to the size of the original roll-length quicktime. You may have to take things a step further and subclip each clip to strip away the extra media.

best,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Blake, the issue isn\’t just about the \”charge\” that the UPS battery is holding. The problem is more likely that it isn\’t hefty enough to supply adequate power to your gear. Small drops in supply levels could cause your disks to spin down very briefly, enough to cause IO errors, which lead to crashes (hence all the crashes on export).
Have you tried running some exports without the UPS in the system? I would have done that before all the other tests.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Thanks for the input guys!

I’m going to take all the gear back to the shop and see if we can try out a new power supply. Failing that, I’m hoping they have an enclosure kicking around that has the same chipset/firmware (probably a long shot, given the age of the drive).

R-Studio looks like a good tool to have around. In this case, the data in question isn’t really worth the cost of buying the software and 2 TB of storage to rebuild the volume onto. So I’ll probably end up reformatting and using the drives as internal storage.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Very sorry all, I should have posted this in the RAID forum!

I’m moving the thread here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/292/625

[Matt Lyon]

I would for sure ditch the UPS. I’ve definitely witnessed almost the exact same symptoms on a machine with an underpowered UPS. This seems especially likely since your problems got “less worse” when you switched drives … which was probably lower powered and therefore the UPS was slightly less taxed.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

You can also keep a “console” window open (Applications>Utilities>Console) while editing and see if Final Cut spits out any error messages. If you see any I/O errors, it could point to problems with the disk drives or buses.

It also probably couldn’t hurt to zap your PRAM. I like to do this whenever I modify any hardware aspects of my machine.

Have you talked to your vendor about these issues?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Like other people have said, it’s pretty hard to draw general conclusions about why crashes happen. Every editor will have a different set of anecdotes.

In my case, we just upgraded at work from a G5 w/ os 10.4.11 to an Intel box w/ Snow Leopard. Still running FCP 6.0.6 though. I have found it to be LESS stable then my old configuration.

But, I have been experimenting with booting in 32 bit kernel mode (hold down the “3” and “2” key during startup). I have definitely noticed much less crashes. I can’t speak for whether this would be the case w/ FCP 7.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

The connector tab. That little “v1” thing you see on the timeline, You drag that to the video track you want to export the EDL. So for EDL1…have on V1. For EDL2…drag to V2.

Also, make sure to select the “export target video track only” option in the EDL options window for this to work properly.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Joe, this sounds interesting but I also feel I may be missing something. If you are recording straight to hard disk (directly from the Telecine?), then where is this TC coming from and what does it relate to?

As for the sound part of things: In my experience, I’ve received already sync’d dailies tapes from the lab with matching ALEs that include AUDIO TC metadata that gets automatically imported into my CTDB. How exactly this gets generated, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure the dailies transfer person is not manually entering these numbers. Your best bet would probably be to talk to the tech folks at a transfer facility and see what software/hardware they use to make this possible.

But the advantage of syncing sound DURING the transfer are immense. You can window burn the audio TC directly into the picture (along w/ TC and KK). I personally would not want to edit a project without all three of these window burns. They are your best protection for a smooth conform.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto