[Matt Thomas]

OK, strange thing

I made a DVD in iDVD out of the h264 file.

When I play the DVD on my laptop the audio and video are out of sync. (onboard sound/speakers, laptop screen, macbook pro intel 2.4GHZ, Core 2, 4GB RAM)

But then I play it on my DVD player and TV and it is fine.

Weird..

Anyway, I think I can assume that its ok, and deliver it to MTV..

Matt

[Matt Thomas]

thanks

that was my thought too, I will go back to the editing place ( a friends house) and try this.

Its extra hard as his copy of FCP is in german (he’s swiss), and I only speak basic german, so its hard for me to look through settings, oh well 🙂

thanks again for your time

matt

[Matt Thomas]

Thanks for your reply

Firstly, I know, I wasn’t editing in h264, I was outputting in H264, as per MTV’s specific request.

It was this output file that had the audio out of sync on another computer (my macbook pro) (it plays fine on the editing computer, a macpro). So I used quicktime to convert this H264 file to a smaller file purely to see if the audio was out of sync when the computer wasn’t under such a strain. This smaller file was still out of sync on my laptop.

To answer your other questions:

I have been syncing audio manually, not using clips with audio (its a music video).

On the editing computer, I am only monitoring video on the computer monitor, and the audio through an apogee firewire “duet”

cheers
Matt

[Matt Thomas]

So I tried putting the clip into a virgin sequence, and it asked me the big german question that I have just been clicking “ja” (yes) to blindly. And in the new sequence didn’t change brightness on playback.

I then went back to the original sequence and the problem wasn’t happening there anymore either 🙂

thanks

matt

[Matt Thomas]

Sound possible, I’ll try that tomorrow (when I’m back in front of the computer I’m working on). Perhaps this could explain why the didn’t happen earlier in the project, then did after going via after effects, I was experimenting with different codecs, I can’t remember at what stage I started the sequence, and what codec I was trying at the time..

Obviously this is a 101 question, but since the guy whose system it is is in Egypt.. If it does turn out that this is the issue, how do I go about setting codec of the timeline? ( I imagine this would be easy to figure out if the software was in a language I understood properly.. )

thanks in advance
Matt

ps. I’m going to bed now so I won’t be responding quickly to any further suggestions, but keep them coming! 🙂

[Matt Thomas]

Ha, now I’m going to be busted!

Actually I did the first part of it with a friend, so I don’t know the whole process as he did some of it. Its a music video, it’s meant to be played on MTV in europe in the end, my friend has made a few music videos before, albeit low budget ones, he is a student of a 3D animation, and not a professional.

I also don’t have it in front of me at the moment so I can’t check stuff, but from memory:

It was shot on a Cannon SLR something, 550D maybe.

My friend converted it from the Cannons format (whatever that was) to suitable for FCP. We had this playing of an external firewire drive, I didn’t notice any brightness change going on in FCP.

I did a basic edit.

He imported the edit into After Effects (not sure what format, I didn’t do it) for some effects. After after effects we then had to output it as a PNG sequence, because his computer crashed every time we tried outputting it as a film.

I then export the PNG sequence to Quicktime and export as apple pro 444 (for no particular reason, it just seemed a good guess) to the internal drive

I import that back into FCP, and try adjusting the colours a bit, with the three colour correction filter. (I’m not sure what its called in english, we’re using german software. Actually half the issue is the software is in german, my friend is Swiss, we started the project together, but now he is on holiday in Egypt and I’m trying to continue working on it on his computer, and I I only speak basic german! To add to the issues for some reason the internet isn’t working at his place since he’s gone, so I can only google questions on my iphone… doh! I am at home on my computer at the moment)

Its at this 2nd FCP stage that the brightness changes on playback, the footage is now on the internal drive. The files mov are quite big, around a gig for each 30 second segment. I would have thought this doesn’t matter since it renders everything anyway?

I tried to keep the files high quality (without really knowing what I’m doing), but my gradients still aren’t smooth, but that’s another issue..

So thats approximately what’s going on..

cheers
Matt

[Matt Thomas]

Thank Shane, I appreciate it.

Unfortunately I don’t have a set up suitable for easily outputting to a TV.

It is fully rendered according to the timeline (no green bars etc)

It is playing off the internal drive on an 8-core MacPro with plenty of RAM. Perhaps I should try putting it on another drive..

Your reply says “it isn’t really happening”. So do I understand this correctly if this means I should only worry about the colour on the paused frames, and not during playback?

thanks
Matt