[Nick Meyers]

first things first: talk to your sound people, ask what they want

clock leader on the head, a sync mark on the tail,
and pips on all tracks head and tail.

i prefer to export a frame of tone to make a “hard copy”. if you leave the tone generator in the timeline,
once you add handles head and tail, it ads up to a lot of excess audio you don’t need in your OMF.

separate dialogue, narration, sound effects and music onto different sets of tracks.

remember: muted clip do NOT appear in the OMF, so if you have alternative takes laid up, un-mute them, and lower their level instead.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

what more control do you need?
the DAC has a volume control, i believe.

what i find useful is a small Behringer mixer.
separate volume control for the powered speakers, and my headphones.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

depending on what you used to convert to ProRes, (what did you use? my solution may not be relevant,
however the symptoms do sound similar.
(everything looking fine in FCP, but exports have the video slipped out of sync by a few frames)

you batch export by selecting a group of clips in the browser, and either:
right or control click, and chose “Batch export”
or
go to the FIle Menu > Batch export

you’d export at Quicktime move, Current Settings.
if you clips have audio include audio.
dont re-compress,
don’t use in to out

the image and sound will not be re-compressed, but if you have a dodgy TC track, this process will give you a new one.

import the new file/s, open into the viewer. it’d only in the viewer that you can modify TC
to tell the truth i can’t remember if we had to modify theTC or not, it was 5 years ago, and my assistant is the one who did this on a daily basis.
check the TC on he new file… is it different from the old one?
I think ours was off by a few frames: basically the same sync offset we got on export.
if it;s incorrect fix it.

to re-connect, i will often find the original clip in the finder, and modify it’s name by adding an x, say, to the start.
this will force it offline in FCP, the i reconnect to the new file

you would only had to do the clips that are giving you trouble.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

first question really should be: what format is your media?
if it’s H264, then sync issues are expected, FCP doesn’t like it.
you need to convert to ProRes.

iv’e been working with Prores multiclips in FCP7 / OS 10.10, and have no sync issues.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

i have experienced something similar to this.
everything loked fine in the timeline, and in FCP, but exports had the video slipped out of sync.

our issue was there was a broken or corrupt TC track on our clips.
solution was to batch export the clips, (they then had slightly incorrect TC)
bring them back into FCP, correct the TC in the TC Modify window,
and then reconnect.

hope that can fix your problem

nick

[Nick Meyers]

one solution i have heard of is to open your project with the media drive disconnected.

a common reason for the project not opening is a particular piece of media that is giving it trouble,
so opening with the media offline can work.
you then reconnect, and possibly in the process discover the problem clip/s.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

i’d say it’d play back better if you compress the audio.
if this is for a streaming server like Vimeo, they will compress the audio if you don’t
there’s not much point in leaving the audio uncompressed.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

what Shane says

OR,
if you really want to get rid of those empty tracks for good from the master file
use an app called QTChange
https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/42/qtchange

“i have to place them onto the timeline, unsync them, delete unwanted tracks, sync them again. It slows down the process tremendously”

there is a quicker way:
lock the picture,
lock the 1st 2 audio tracks,
select all, delete.

then…

copy all in the timeline
delete the original clips from the browser,
copy the 2tk clips into a new bin.
now you have 2tk master clips, and match framing should bring up the 2tk version.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

don’t forget to compress the audio to AAC as well,
that takes up a lot of space.

Vimeo recommend 320 kbps for stereo
128 is acceptable.
if your source is mono, drop to mono and halve the data rate again.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

yes, most likely the timeline hasn’t been rendered.
sometimes a simple Command R isn’t enough,
unless your FCP is set up for it, it won’t render a lot of the real time playback effects.
even the Render All command (Option R i think) doesn’t render “full quality” real time playback effects unless it’s set up to do so in the Sequnce Menu render controls.

another gothcha here is that with certain types of (non I-frame) media (HDV or XDCam for instance) there can be no render indicators, and yet, FCP has to create new media for an export.

i saw this on my last project, where we’d have a bunch of XDCam clips in the timeline , no effects.
hit “render al” and FCP has to “render” up to 15 frames either side of every edit.
if you haven’t done this, exports of any type can take a long time.

reference files are ok when you’re in a rush, or if you just need something to drop into Compressor or Encoder,
but they are risky: they rely on render files that may not exist after a certain time,
so don’t bet on them working after a week, and always label them “REF” of something, so you know.

they also do export a hard copy of the audio.
if you don’t need the audio, remember to export as “Video Only” on the export page,
then it’ll be lightning fast.

nick