exporting Quicktime Codec error

<<<I didn't read the entire thread, so forgive if I ask something already answered... >>>

Wouldn't do any good if you had. This is somebody else's thread. My thread is somewhere else.

<<<How many hours do they have on them? >>>

One of them has 72.

Both (all three) machines are under Sony Support. They are not allowed to go down. Ever.

"Mr. Sony" was by Monday and, once again, proved the machines are in perfect working order and I believe him because they're used constantly (you need a machine, take a number) and the only time they failed was with one Avid and our two Final Cut machines.

Because of the show-linked genlock services inside the Avid, We believe we've solved the Avid problem. I will make many more tests today.

But the FCP machines are still something of a mystery. I'm holding in my hand a tape I laid off from the Kona II machine. I blacked the tape on the machine assigned to me, loaded bars and tone onto an uncompressed timeline and performed 10 second insert edits one after the other.

The fourth one made the DBeta machine throw up on playback. All the other edits performed perfectly.

This is the Reader's Digest version of many weeks.

I know from reading ANSI/SMPTE-259M that the 48 KHz audio sampling signal is, or must be related to the video (in America) to the tune of:

48 KHz = fH x 1144/375.

Aren't you glad you asked?

If you don't maintain that relationship, then periodically, audio and video drift out of step with each other (See railroad illustration, above) and cause the DBeta internal bookkeeping to go bonkity-poo.

And not a pretty bonkity-poo, either.

Please be clear I'm not talking about lip sync. That would be a gross error, way too obvious and easy to check. I'm talking about a very subtle digital shift between two high frequency digital bitstreams that are supposed to be perfectly locked--and aren't.

Maybe.

We don't know that's what's wrong, but being engineers, we're designing tools to hopefully tell us.

Koz

Ah, sorry, then.

One of the best engineers whom with I had the luxury of working liked to calm down the exitable editors with the ever-popular, "When you hear hoofbeats, don't look for zebras" metaphor.

It's not always the worst scenario, and quite likely, it's the one-button theory. Figure out what button that is, and you're back in business.

I see now that you are stranded in the Serengeti in a herd of zebra! Tally-ho!!

deb

<<<When you hear hoofbeats, don't look for zebras>>>

But if you do this long enough, on rare occasions, zebras.

"When you've eliminated all the other possibilities, whatever is left, however improbable, is the truth."

--Sherlock Holmes--

And since the dog didn't eat the butter, we need to entertain zebras.

The normal problem that everybody has every day and posts on a regular basis is dropped frames. That's clearly a Final Cut or Machine issue and is even visible in the exported show--as it's going out. Dropped frames is also almost always linked to lip sync if it's bad enough.

We don't have lip sync issues. Five minutes into a completely destroyed playback, what audio remains on the tape is in sync. It does rather bother me that both the AJ Io and the AJA Kona II do it. I can make a great case for one or the other.

The Sony Guy says he has absolutely run into this before in other shops and it's almost always genlock issues. We of the engineering persuation believe we have a pretty good idea why genlock is such a critical issue.


Between us, we seem to have run out of Eye of Newt. I'll have to stop by Gelson's on the way home.

Koz