OT: Something about external sound.

First of all all the best to you and your beloved for the New Year.
And special thanks to Mike for the Old Year.

Over the last weeks I was very busy with a job and also got a lot of mails which had been related to this job. All were about external sound and how it is handled within Final Cut.
I did made some posts several times ago, but I think a comprehensive one may help some people to understand better - and will refresh the old stuff.

Though current versions of Final Cut Pro support BWAV audio import up to an certain extend not all informations will be read when you import BWAV files.
The timecode which is displayed for audio files is not a QuickTime timecode and so you can't sync clips by timecode as Final Cut Pro uses the QT timecode to sync clips.
The timeecode displayed for the audio and audio speed (sampling) furthermore relies on the actual project settings you have set when you import the audio file (with FCP 6 - earlier versions rely in the easy setup when you started FCP).
This way of audio timecode handling does make it impossible to create multiclips based upon timecode and even will make subclips totally unreliable within a project which may need to use offline/online handling - or need a re-connect after crash.
An additional lack of handling is the way of combining camera sound with external sound when it comes to an external application or just to a simple re-connect of clips.
Final Cut always will read the complete camera/video file and the external audio. This will lead to a mismatch if you did setup a clip with external audio and did remove some of the camera sound channels.
Here an example: you got a camera/video file with 2 sound channels and external sound with 3 channels, you did delete the sound from camera/video and linked the external audio channels to the video - this makes the clip 1V, 3A. Making this new clip offline/online (or export as XML and re-import) will display 1V, 5A and you will get either an error when double clicking this clip in the browser or a very strange clip which still contains all audio channels but not in real sync with the picture. You still can drag the clip into the timeline and it might look okay, but finally you got some kind of timebomb in your project.

This will also influence the creation of multiclips with external audio as you always have to use the "In Points" option - since audio does not have a QT timecode.

There is no problem if you work with P2 plus the mxf4mac component as this way of working handles camera audio as external audio!

Hope this helps the one or other.

Andreas