[William Carr]

Pro Res is good, made for FCP.

If only those two clips are causing the problem, can you re-ingest or re-transcode them from the original format? (Assuming they were originally an mpeg camera record format or from tape.) Even though they seem fine to the program you ran there may be something it’s not seeing that FCP is.

[William Carr]

Could be corrupted clips, and/or you are editing with GOP codec.

[William Carr]

That would be quite awesome!– though in a new MBPRO would void the Applecare.

[William Carr]

Awesome. Thanks!

[William Carr]

SSD?

[William Carr]

FYI what I learned when shooting at 720p 60 to get slo-mo shots for a 24p project (with my GH2) was you need to use a minimum shutter speed of 125 or things can look wacky bad.

[William Carr]

It may seem like a lot of work right now at the front side of the project, but if you don’t invest x-amount of effort now to transcode everything to a common format– ProRes– it will require x+y-amount of effort in the middle of your actual edit. A brand new HDD with lots of room is cheap. And get another one to back it all up and put on the shelf. For example, I have several FW800 G-RAIDs from 2-6 TB for editing, and then single-platter OWC HDDs with the same Capture Scratch folders duplicated on them in case a RAID goes down. A poor man’s version of more expensive RAID 5 or 6 array. And I keep those back-up drives off site by the way.

Bottom line is, if you don’t prepare a large project well, there are too many pitfalls that will reveal themselves at the worst times.

Another thing, if you’re now the arbiter of the total media for this project you might want to batch rename all the clip groups to something helpful for organizing or ID’ing standalone clips. Not all projects need this but some do. You can keep keep some kind of original reel/card name code, and add short text/digits that represent the content. Some say it’s blasphemous to remove the identical file name as it appears on the card, but that depends on who might need the clips down the line and for what purpose. A middle ground is to keep the newly named clips in groups of sequenced clips identical to the clip group and order in each original card, so it’s easy to match them up if necessary later.

And as far as markers on clips, etc., why don’t you first organize all the clips into subject bins, then as you do a familiarization pass you can decide whether markers are necessary. Personally I don’t use markers for this, nor do I make subclips; I create a timeline for each interview or prolonged action clip and segment the the clip into the bites I like. It’s easy to review and rearrange and pull from those sequences. Then again, I’m very object oriented, and prefer the paradigm of blocks of sequential footage.

Here’s a real pro’s excellent volume of advice on the organizing subject:
https://training.creativecow.net/dvd_store/get_organized_fcp/get_organized_fcp.html

[William Carr]

Somewhere in settings, there is a check box for something like Scale Items to Sequence.

For certain short docs I shoot 1080 then edit on a 720 sequence, scaling and adding zooms to many shots for an enhanced active style. It can be a great additional tool to bring an extra level of energy to a piece.

[William Carr]

It feels so satisfying to have a problem resolved!

[William Carr]

So is the only aspect different than when everything worked great, that the internal battery is dead and you are using a new AC adapter? Is the AC adapter an Apple model, new?