[Vanessa Mcdonnell]

Hi Greg – Although I still don’t have an actual explanation for this glitch I was able to stop it from happening by using render manager often to clear out ALL of the audio render files from my project. So most likely it was caused by a bad render file.

It did not work to just clear the render files that corresponded to the sequences where the problem was happening – I had to check-mark the entire project in render manager and delete all the audio render files and then immediately close and reopen the project.

I started doing this at least weekly and the problem hasn’t come up again since. My project is massive with hundreds of sequences and many of my sequences contain many tracks of audio, therefore needing to be rendered for playback. Not sure if this applies to your project but I hope this works for you!

[Vanessa Mcdonnell]

Thanks so much Dave and Michael, I appreciate your input.

Dave – I’ve restarted many times over the long period that I’ve been working on this project and the problem still pops up periodically. In fact I notice that something that was fine yesterday is not fine today after a restart. But I will definitely try trashing my preferences.

Michael – all of my audio is 48khz and 24bit, and I’ve never had to render it when putting it into a sequence. That being said, I do know that some of my audio was recorded at 24 fps and some at 30 fps. I actually don’t know if that even means anything at all since audio does not exist in frames – but this was a 16mm film shoot with audio recording on a separate digital system and I know that we had a fill-in recordist use a 30 fps setting instead of 24 for part of the shoot. Again I don’t know that it means anything, it doesn’t even seem as though FCP stores this data.

Our video is 23.98 because I processed it through cinema tools to remove the pulldown. We had our 16mm film telecined and received miniDV tapes. I digitized those and the original clips were 29.97 from tape. Then I processed through Cinema Tools to get the 23.98 video files, which I then synced to our audio and used the Merge Clips function.

99.9% of the audio files I’m working with are the production sound files described above, but I have a few other random audio files that I’m trying out as temporary sound that are from CD’s or from a portable digital recorder. The problem affected one of these files for the first time the other day so this made me think that the problem is not related to any specific file type or the fact that I’m working with merged clips. It made me think that it must be some kind of larger, overall FCP problem that can affect any sound file that is within a sequence.

And just as a footnote, I’ve never had the slightest problem with any of my merged clips drifting out of sync over time.

Thanks again guys!

[Vanessa Mcdonnell]

Thanks Dave. This is my set up:

MacBook Pro
OSX 10.6.4
FCP 6.0.6
Using 1 external drive via FW 800
Drive is a Glyph GT050Q
Video is 23.98 DV/DVCPRO – NTSC (digitized from tape w/FCP)
Most of my production audio consists of 48KHz WAV’s, most with 4 discrete tracks (the problem always happens to all tracks). The problem has happened with a stereo AIFF containing 2 tracks as well, however.

The problem always happens in a sequence, never to a source clip (or to the merged clips that I’m treating as source). I can copy and paste the problematic clips into new empty sequences and the problem remains.