New Final Cut Pro user Q's

Hi everybody I am a new Final Cut Pro user and had a question that confused me to no end on a project.

I am an English teacher in Japan and for my new students I made an introductory video in Final Cut. I was doing really basic stuff, like rotating video, speeding up, slowing down, and basic built in transitions.

However for all the clips where I was doing anything like this it wouldn't render correctly. On the time line above all of these clips was a bluish gray line and when I hovered my mouse over it it would tell me (this is the Japanese translation) that "RT Extreme didn't support this operation" or something to that effect. I found it weird that in Final cut they video played just fine with all the clips speeding up, slowing down, and being rotated, but the exported QuickTime movie clips was all garbled, stuttering, or just plain messed up at the parts where I was using effects.

For some back ground all the clips were taken from my Canon digital camera, and when I made no changes (ie didn't add effects or speed up slow down etc) they could be edited and exported just fine.

I really want to learn more about FCP and really use it to teach in the class room or in my next job. Thank you so much for any information!

I don't know about Japaneses translation, but did you try trashing your preferances?
(See FAQ)

How are you exporting? Using Quicktime Conversion? Also what are your FCP specs and computer specs?

Please give the exact item properties of the clips you're editing and the exact item properties of the sequence you're editing in.

All the best,

Tom

A few questions to help solve your problem

1 - you used video from your canon digital camera - what format does that camera create - did you bring in through log and transfer? Did you use mp4 clips (not advised - better to trans code to a pro-res format) Was it HD and outputted SD?

2 - the bluish gray line -- you might want to select that section of the clip - go up to the render pulldown menu and try render only FULL --

3 - what are your timeline settings -- is it low res - unlimited RT? (pull down menu upper left hand corner of the timeline that has the letters RT -- change that to SAFE RT and all the other settings at FULL or Dynamic -- if you exported with low res timeline settings this may be your problem.

4 - then go back and re-render the entire timeline -- or better yet - go to the TOOLS pull down menu and select Render Manger and throw away all your render files and then re-render the entire timeline and try exporting again.

Best Andy

Laurie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't know about Japaneses translation, but did
> you try trashing your preferances?
> (See FAQ)
>
> How are you exporting? Using Quicktime Conversion?
> Also what are your FCP specs and computer specs?

I have not tried trashing my prefs but will give that a try. I am exporting using "Quicktime Movie" and then using just using the default settings after that. I am using a 13" unibody MacBook pro 2.26 Core 2 Duo and 2 gb's of ram.

Tom:

The clips that I am editing was copied from my SD card out of my Canon Ixy 920IS. They are in .mov format. The types of edits I am trying to do include slowing a clip to 60% speed, playing another clip backwards to -100% and -50% speed, rotating a video -90 degrees, and adding a cross fade effect. All of these (especially the clip that I was rotating) were giving me the problem. (Sorry I hope this is what your were asking for, I am not exactly sure what you mean by "properties of the sequence"

Andy:

1. I imported the clip into iPhoto, and then copied them from iPhoto into the FCP browser. I don't think the clips are HD (I am pretty sure my camera can't shoot HD) and they are just being exported as a quicktime movie to be burned to DVD. Also SD. The clips are in .mov format.

2. Is "Render full" under the sequence menu head? I see something like "Render all," is that it? (Sorry, again using the Japanese version)

3. I checked the timeline settings and it looked like I had three options: Only play base layer, Use player settings, and High quality (again sorry Japanese translations so I hope these makes sense). It was on High Quality but changing it to the other settings didn't change anything.

4. I went into the Render Manager but I can't see how to delete whats in there. I tried just hitting delete but nothing happened.

Thank you guys so much for your help! I really appreciate it.

how about if you export using qt conversion, just for a test make it h.264 best quality, current frame rate. resize it to about half. Does it still act funny?

Ah! Laurie thank you so much! I don't know why but that seemed to work! I am now able to export the movie with the transitions and modifications to the video files! Thank you so much.

Do you know of any reason why the "Export as quicktime movie" wouldn't work?

Thanks again (and from my students!)

I honestly don't know why. I always have issues exporting as a qt movie. qt conversion hardly ever gives me any troubles.
So happy it works now for you, sorry I can't tell you why it did. Maybe a Mod would know?

There's definitely something strange about the format you originally shot in. When you did QuickTime Conversion, it recompressed the footage so whatever the problem was went away.

But you still haven't told us the codec you were using. It's a .mov file but that's just the container - it can contain many different types of codecs. If you open one of the files in QuickTime Player and go to Window > Show Movie Inspector, it will show the video codec used by the file.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Checking it in quick time it says for format: "H.264, 640x480, approx 1.6 million colors, linear PCM, 16 bit little endiam code attached integer, 1 channel, 44100 hz"

I'm not 100 percent on the translation for the "code attached integer" part but I think it translates as somethin like that.

It looks like an obscure proprietary format that FCP doesn't like. To prevent this happening in future, you're best off converting to a flavor of ProRes before you start editing.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...