[Nathan Troester]

Set the length of your comp to 60 seconds.
Select all of the layers (Edit > Select All).
Place the current-time indicator at the end of the comp.
On the keyboard, Option + ] (or Alt + right bracket)

Much easier than dragging a hundred layers!

[Nathan Troester]

Good news… maybe…

Yes, FCP does do automatic backups of your project (just the project file, not the media). You can check this location by going to System Settings and then looking to see where the Autosave Vault is saving to. I belive the defualt location is somewhere in Documents/Final Cut Pro Documents/… .

For your sake, I hope it is your internal HD. 🙂

[Nathan Troester]

What are the pixel dimensions of your images? If the images are smaller than your sequence dimesions and you’re resizing them, you might see some loss in quality.

Another thing to check is the RT (real-time) settings in FCP. There’s a little drop-down button on the top left corner of the sequence which, if set to “low” or “medium” will influence how your footage is viewed. This will be especially the case if you are looking at the sequence on an NTSC monitor. The “low” and “medium” settings only play one field. (This is actually really useful if you are trying to preview lots of layers in real time.)

[Nathan Troester]

What you’ll want to do is select all the layers that you want to mask then go to your Layer menu and select Pre-compose. This will create a sub-composition right in your original composition. You can create the mask on this sub-compostion and, if I understand correctly, get what you want.

Good luck,
Nathan

[Nathan Troester]

Would audio at different sampling rates also cause a similar problem?

[Nathan Troester]

You should be able to capture either tapes.

Are you wanting to automate/control your decks to tranfer the footage? For example, set your capture length to 60 minutes, walk away, and come back when it’s done?

If your tapes don’t have time code, that won’t be possible. You can set the Device Control in Log and Capture to “Non-Controlable Device” and capture with the “Now” button. You’ll have to stop the capture when it’s done.
If the tapes have timecode and the TC drops, you can disable “Abort capture on dropped frames” in the User Preferences.

Best wishes,
Nathan

[Nathan Troester]

Hello Rick,
I’m having the exact same audio drop problem with my AJA IO LA. It dropped even with a fresh install of OSX.4 and FCP. I too have reinstalled drivers and trashed FCP prefs.

The problem seemed to introduce itself after the installation of an xSAN. I also installed the latest AJA driver then. Most of the time if the project is exported to the desktop and then imported into an empty project and mastered it will work. In other words, the media is coming from the local drive rather than the SAN. But like you said, the problem is so inconsistent that it’s almost impossible to predict a drop with any accuracy. Audio has also occasionally dropped when mastering from the local drive.

I also talked to the tech support at AJA a couple months ago, but didn’t get a conclusive answer.

Rick, just curious, what kind of media storage are you using? Have you tested your replacement from AJA?

Nathan

[Nathan Troester]

Does 8.2.2 work with Tiger?