[Michael Black fcp]

This seems to be limited to our dialog only.

[Michael Black fcp]

We were about to try that when I did the following to get it to work.

1) I opened the 24-bit wave files in Quicktime player and revealed the movie properties. This revealed a timecode track that was disabled. I enabled the TC track and then saved the file as a movie (this created a weird visual track that was a bunch of random numbers in a small, lo-res image). I then brought this file into FCP, which then recognized the file as being 23.98. But that was only half the battle.

2) placing the sound into my ProRes timeline, still gave me weird results. Weird playback issue. So I started to question whether or not (perish the thought) the sound mixers had mixed to the wrong movie. I didn’t think it was possible, but I had to check. So I got the quicktime they used to mix to, which matched my prores edit. SO that wasn’t the problem.

3) so next I created a new timeline and placed the h.264 reference quicktime in without sound. Then I dropped the wave file (from the quicktime movie) into that time line and it synched up fine. I believe my words at this discover were in the nature of “WTF?”. It lines up with h.264 quicktime, the h.264 quicktime lines up with the ProRes Timeline…. if a=b, b=c…..

4) So then I copied and pasted the sound from the h.264 timeline into the ProRes Quicktime, and it LINED UP FINE. Consistent synch all throughout. The same sound file that when inserted into my locked ProRes timeline had to be put into another timeline, then copied and pasted in.

So……. that’s the workaround if that ever happens.

[Michael Black fcp]

The weird thing is that the sound starts out out-of-sync, is actually early. At about 11 minutes it actually looks like it’s in-sync, then, from there, gets later and later. So just doing any kind of speed adjustment immediately throws off one part or another.

We have been consistently tapeless from the get go (this is an animated feature). They synched to a locked-edit on QuickTime which was rendered at 23.98. When we look at the wave files in ProTools, it reads as a 24 fps time code based file.

Thanks for your help.

[Michael Black fcp]

The plot thickens… we took it back to a sound house where they re-imported the wavs back into their protools session, where they tell me it’s synching fine… I’m terribly confused. Is this some sort of FCP bug?

[Michael Black fcp]

Totally what I thought… just needed a second opinion. They’re saying that every thing is fine on their end… we’re taking the sound files back to them to see if there was something wrong with the export. Everything was done in 23.98… so it does seem like the problem is in the export.

You’d think a place like this… I won’t say their name, but they are an internationally recognized company… would have their stuff together a little better. But I guess when you have a big enough reputation, you don’t really have to waste time doing it right….

[Michael Black fcp]

It’s not so much embedding as superimposing. Someone with Quicktime Pro could easily turn the track off, but it pretty much accomplishes what I need to do. I’m not super code-savvy, but I can fake my way with some basic understanding and copy and paste skills.

Basically, put this text into a .txt file. It can’t be .rtf, or anything else. Just plain text.

{QTtext}{keyedText: on}{font:Geneva}{plain}{size:24}{textColor: 65535, 65535, 65535}{justify:center}{timeScale:600}{width:640}{height:360}{timeStamps:absolute}{language:0}{textEncoding:0}
[00:00:00.000] CONFIDENTIAL — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

WORK IN PROGRESS – 090424
[00:00:30.000]

That will create 30 seconds of text that reads “CONFIDENTIAL — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” across the top, and “WORK IN PROGRESS – 090424” across the bottom. You can then open that with quicktime player, which then interprets the size of the movie (640×360) and everything else. Then select all, copy, then add and scale to another movie (if the movie is a different size, you can just edit the text in text editor or whatever). It works great and instantly. I’m also going to see if I can just embed it onto a QT reference movie, then run that through compressor to create one single track. I’ll let you know my results.

[Michael Black fcp]

Actually, I was trying to go for more of a text burn-in. You know, like, “Confidential — Not for distribution, put this on the internet and die.”

Turns out, you can do it in Quicktime Pro super easy. It takes some tinkering with text editor, but it’s pretty amazing.

[Michael Black fcp]

Could you share the name of this free subtitling software?

Thanks,
MB

[Michael Black fcp]

Not sure how to fix this exactly. Did you trash the prefs and all that?

In the future, you should use the media manager when doing something like this, so that all the necessary files get copied over and saved.

[Michael Black fcp]

Below “Resize” on the motion tab is “distort”. Is that what you’re talking about?