[William Carr]

Part of the great value of these forums is that users can search and apply thousands of priceless bits of prior experience, through the questions of the posters and the solutions of the experts.

Please let current and future editors know how the problem got solved, otherwise the community’s search benefits are diminished…

[William Carr]

You’re welcome.
Just remember that a Final Cut timeline is happiest when the media in it matches its settings. There are plenty of tools out there to convert clips, including Final Cut’s good friend Compressor, as you’ve found.

Best of luck..

[William Carr]

Please say what the problem / solution was, so others can benefit.

[William Carr]

Glad to hear you are having less problems.

Again, all audio and video elements are best converted to the chosen format of your timeline. H264 is not an editing codec. Placing H264 on your timeline will require Final Cut to render it anyway. So why not convert your mp4 to DV and place THAT in your DV timeline?

[William Carr]

1- Your external drive may be too full. 80% is a topoff point.

2- How much “uncompressed” material on your timeline? Convert those clips with compressor to the native timeline settings and then reconnect those versions. Same with other render-heavy / off-format clips.

3- If you are setting your whole timeline to render and then walking away, it may be just one or a few clips that are the problem. Consider rendering one at a time, or at least one at a time of the off-format clips or stills, to see which may be hanging up the whole project.

4- Make sure your render folder is on your external drive, if you didn’t set it up that way the default is your internal.

[William Carr]

You guess correctly! Projects on the old PowerBook would be only to ingest.

So while we’re out of town on the shoot we’ll be able to view/check the P2 clips, convert them to FC-flavored QTs to an external drive, and keep the original P2 folders saved to another external drive. There’s a good production workflow!

Thanks so much for the advice.

[William Carr]

Noah, one last question on this:

If I can install a 5.1 FCP on the older PowerBook, and ingest P2 clips thereby creating an FCP Quicktime set of these clips, will those (5.1) QTs open and edit back home in my current and happy FCS2 6.05 system?

Thanks!

[William Carr]

This is a good idea. I have an old G4 tower with another FCP license that was never upgraded, I’l check to see how P2-ready that version is, and if OK find those disks and install on the PowerBook.

Thanks!

[William Carr]

Yes, the PowerBook is too underpowered and FCS refrains from installing. So I am trying to figure out a way to know for sure I have OK clips backed up on the hard drive before I wipe the cards.

[William Carr]

Thanks for info… the problem is we will not have a Mac during the shoot with FCS loaded. It’s an old 1ghz PowerBook with the PC card slot, to transfer/back-up the P2 files to an external drive. No way to actually SEE see the clips (P2CMS will not play back P2 clips on that Mac, I tried).

So the only thing I can think of is to buy a P2 ingest/viewing app which will run on the old PowerBook, the cheapest of which I believe is about $200.