[Naiche Lujan]

Baz, Thank you!

Actually in my setup, it seems to be under the Clip Settings(don’t understand how that makes sense, capture makes more sense.) And you basically click the mute-looking button.

I don’t know why clicking that did not occur to me. Worked like a charm.

[Naiche Lujan]

thanks bob

Actually, for the record, I did find out how to monitor the audio. It was really simple, but as I am new to FCP, I wasn’t aware of the need to check the box for Audio monitoring.

In the Log and Capture dialog, under the Clip Settings tab, you have to check the Preview box under the Audio section.

[Naiche Lujan]

you may want to ask what the clients’ settings were when they imported to FCP. Maybe you can get the codec necessary to read those files.

also, if they shot in HDV on miniDV tape, you could always ask them for the source footage and import it yourself.

Vegas should read HDV footage, but they usually have a different file extension “m2t”. Maybe if you change the file extension it will work, if it is truly HDV.

Also do you have Quicktime Pro installed. That may include some apple codecs necessary to read the files correctly.

That’s all I got. Good Luck.

[Naiche Lujan]

A couple things to try…or know about when working with various formats on the timeline.

When you right-click the image on the timeline and go its properties, there is a Media tab where you can adjust the Pixel Aspect Ratio. There is a frustrating thing that editors have to deal with, the difference between square and rectangular pixels. It has to do with how video developed historically and is worth googling. But I usually have to adjust my 720×480 PNG files to 0.9091(NTSC DV) since it is set to 1.000(square) by default.

Also, if your video is smaller than the project settings, you may try to open up the Event Pan/Crop settings for each segment and right-click–>Match Output Aspect. This will resize the video to the appropriate size (and it may crop it to fit the output size as well).

Either way, you have a few things to play with.

[Naiche Lujan]

Devon,

Are you using a 64-bit OS? I wonder if that could be the reason. I am using 64-bit XP on the machine where I had the problem. I don’t know that much on the programming end, but I know that a lot of programs don’t always run as expected on 64-bit systems. Also, is your laptop running 32-bit or 64-bit?

Just a thought.

[Naiche Lujan]

Thanks Mike.

I think the problem is with the source or more likely the dub. Good to know how the software works.

I’ll redub the footage and make sure it’s got the correct audio settings.

[Naiche Lujan]

It’s not bleed. Yes, one mic for interviewer and the other for interviewee.

When I choose Lefy Only, and I export to file, and playback the file, one speaker is definitely louder than the other, giving it an unbalanced feel. This is while one person is talking. Strangely, both the interviewer and interviewee are stronger on the same speaker, the right one, which is doubly strange because I chose Left Only for interviewee, and Right Only for Interviewer.

It is possible that something in my setup is wrong.

So let me ask the theoretical question, when I choose Left Only, SHOULD I hear that left channel on both speakers at equal volume level, or only on the left speaker while the right speaker is quiet?

In my opinion, whatever I hear from the timeline when I hit play should be what I hear when I export to file. That makes sense to me but it’s not exactly what I’m getting.

[Naiche Lujan]

I never knew that. Why does that seem so odd?

How do you explain the difference I hear when playing back the audio on the timeline. There is a marked difference when I switch between, Right Only, Left Only, Combined, Swap, Both.

And why have the option of Left Only when it’s not going to give you Left Only?

So, is the only workaround to export the audio to another editor and resample it, and then bring it back in as a monotrack, so that I can get the same on either speaker?

[Naiche Lujan]

I had this problem a while back when I was using the Cartoonr video effect plugin. I couldn’t figure it out and had to give up. But in hind sight, one thing I didn’t try was to break it up into chunks and render those out, then you could drag them back into the timeline and render again to wmv.

Nevertheless, that is very frustrating because there is no good reason why it shouldn’t be able to render. If it’s getting too overloading then the program should slow down to accomodate what it’s doing. In this case I wouldn’t care if it took two hours to render 2 minutes, but at least do it.

The only thing that can make these difficult to troubleshoot is that there are so many factors involved. There could be firmware or driver issues that you are dealing with. Or prehaps there is a bad sector on your hard drive and every time it gets to that point, it can’t figure out what to do. It actually may not be Vegas that is the problem.

Maybe someone with more programming type knowledge would be able to help you adjust some settings as well.

That really sucks. I’ve been through it too. I never found out what it was. It would render out other projects just fine.

Good luck.

[Naiche Lujan]

BTW,
Thanks for the input Rob.
Proceeding accordingly…