No audio when imported

Hi,

I'm running FCP 4.5 on a dual 1.8 G5 with 1.25 gig of ram.
I employed a camerman to shoot some fashion stuff in HD on a sony Z1P which he down converted to SD and placed on his external hard drive as quicktime files. The hard drive is called an X or H craft cooler master.

When I play the clips in the quicktime app i get audio but when I import the clips from his hard drive, into my FCP project I have NO audio. Stange...

Any help would be epic.

Many thanks

How are you listening to the audio? From the computer speakers? Is View>External set to Off?

Hi Tom,

I'm listening through my VTR deck. When I drag the clip to the time line I'm getting no levels either...I tried the apple J thing in QT to see if the track was muxed but it wouldn't let me as it asked me to buy QT pro. I'm running QT 7.1.1. I've restarted as well to no avail...

Cheers mate

So the meters aren't moving when you play this back? What version of FCP are you using? Does FCP recognize the deck at start up?

Well first off, you are crossing FCP4.5 with Qt 7. There have been problems with this in the past. FCP 4.5 came with a license for QT pro 6 and FCP 5 automatically promotes your QT 7 to Pro.

If you have no version of QT 6 left on your system you might want to downgrade to v6. I believe there is a utility on the Mac site somewhere that takes care of this for you.

What does Apple-9 tell you about the clips after you drag them into FCP?

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Hi Andrew,

When I apple 9 the clips it tells me that there is no audio...

Seems as if you have some sort of muxed file. If QT can play audio and FCP doesn't see any audio track that is probably what is happening.
Your version of FCP should have a licence for QT pro 6.x so see if you can download the installer for that and dig up your serial for the Pro-ification. That would at least allow you to confirm what is going on in the file. I'm not familiar with the Z1P but I would guess it shoots in MPEG2 and the operator used some PC utility to downconvert it to SD but it is still a muxed mpeg file.
If possible s/he should be able to give you files in the codec you are editing in that isn't an mpeg2 derivative. DV-NTSC perhaps, or uncompressed 8 bit NTSC.
Getting the original HD files would be good if you have the time to figure out how to get them into a useful format. A search for "FCP" and "Z1P" would be helpful on that matter.
There's still the issue of how you plan on finishing. If this is an offline cut you'll have to track timecode and frame rates carefully. If you are the last stop on the route, get the best image you can into your sequence that is editable and listenable and get cutting.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!