Poster Frame and Trim Mode not working properly with post-synced clips

Hi Everyone-

Final Cut Pro seems to be doing something really odd and I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced it and if so what is the fix:

We are shooting a movie on Red with sound coming in on multitrack wav files. We downconvert the R3D files to Prores and then manually sync the tracks in the timeline.

We link the pix and sound and drag them to the bin to make our dailies. They all play, in sync. When we try to set a poster frame the issues begin. If I load the clip into the browser park the playhead on a frame and choose poster frame, the actual frame in the bin is very noticably offset (often by a few seconds).

Also, when I use the trim mode, the frames jump to a different part of the shot during trim. It's like the shot is jumping ahead or back while I hit the frame advance or recede buttons. Once I let go of the button the image jumps to the correct number of frames. But, it's very distracting if I am trying to trim, for example, to just before an actor blinks. I can't trim 1 frame at a time. I have to keep hitting the button, watching the picture jump to a different part of the shot, release the trim button and watch the picture jump back to the now correctly trimmed frame...

As a test I took some of the Prores clips with scratch track sound and brought them into the bin directly from the finder, bypassing the syncing. Using those clips, the trim and poster frames work as expected. Obviously something is going on during syncing.

I assumed maybe because the audio and pix we different lengths the clip was getting "confused", and didn't know where to "start". So, in the timeline with the synced clips, I razor bladed a few shots, linked them, and dragged them to the bin so the audio and video were the exact same length... Same issue.

I have noticed the same behavior on 2 separate Macs so I don't think its a preference or corrupted install issue.

Anyone seen this and have any suggestions?

Thanks,

David

Hi David,

This is a more or less normal behaviour with external sound since the beginning of Final Cut Pro. There is not much you can do except to export your synced clips as referenced movies.
That's what we do.

I haven't worked with RED. What kind of timecode can you setup on the camera, does the camera have timecode out?
I ask that because I do have an application which can do auto-sync with TOD or REC RUN TC and creates referenced movies.

Regards
Andreas

Hi David.

I assumed maybe because the audio and pix we different lengths the clip was getting "confused", and didn't know where to "start".


i have seen similar issues.
for us, the issues manifested themselves when the synched clips were made into multiclips.
they wouldn't sync properly.
the amount they were out of sync by was the amount of "overhang" of the audio.

if you were interested you could examine that "overhang length" and see if it;s the same duration as your offset.

my solution was to SUBCLIP the linked clips.
this trims the audio down to the same duration as the picture.

we never had problems if the audio was shorter, and the picture was overhanging.

so our process was:

sync all clips in timeline in timeline.
then individually:

link
open into viewer,
subclip
(then remove the word "Subclip" from the subclip)

we used a macro to do this very quickly.


i was very wary of using subclips, especially inside multiclips, but it all worked out ok.
the picture is never being trimmed, so was never susceptible to some of the problems you used to get with subclips.
and the audio behaved itself, too,
except for a slight issue when handing over to the sound dept but ONLY when using a 3rd party app called XML Pro.


cheers,
nick