Videos flipping 180 degrees!

Here is my problem. I created a 10 minute video in FCP which is looking great. When I exported it to MOV, one of the sections is suddenly flipped 180 degrees. When I went back to the source file, it is normal and not flipped! In FCP it looks normal, only when i export i get this one section of one source file rotated!!! Anyone knows what's happening here?

Thank you.

Double check that problem section/clip in your timeline. Double click it, check the filter and motion tabs and make sure you have nothing in these two tabs that might be rotating that section. If you don't and that section plays fine in the timeline, export a self contained quicktime of just that problem section to see if it's still present.

Are you using an H.264 file directly in the timeline? That can cause all sorts of crazy problems.


www.derekmok.com

...not for long...FCP X handles H264 NATIVELY (excited!!)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Hopefully without the bizarre problems that H.264 currently brings to FCP. I just did my first project where I had to edit with H.264 without converting. (The source clips were H.264, and I was editing the clips for an FX artist on a crazy patch-job station where, among other things, ProRes and Compressor's batch-export QuickTime settings didn't work) Quite a travesty, I can tell you.


www.derekmok.com

I have had no issues adding H264 files to any edit. Just lucky I guess.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

How the H.264 file was generated also has something to do with it.

Remember that weirdass issue somebody had with MPEG Streamclip-generated movie files? I had that up the wazoo on that last project, and adding Reel Names made no difference. This station had a defective copy of Compressor (made DVD-bound MPEG-2s just fine; couldn't make a DVCPro HD QuickTime movie to save its life) so I also converted some clips to DVCPro HD with MPEG Streamclip. The resulting clips were also buggy -- before rendering it would show up on the Canvas as about 400 per cent its supposed size, but revert to normal when rendered, so I had to do the reframing and motion stuff "blind", only able to check after rendering, not during positioning.

The H.264s in the actual timeline would go green or shift In-Out points, with no logic (sometimes a render made it happen, sometimes not; the same clip that had no problems for 20 minutes would suddenly "bounce" to a corrupted version). Rendering does not fix these cases and would sometimes make it worse (eg. whole screen green). When I talked to the vault operator who made the H.264 originals (DVD extractions), she concurred about the same phenomenon. MPEG Streamclip is generating bad QuickTime metadata somehow. So, about 80 per cent of the H.264 clips could be re-exported in my edited form; about 20 per cent of them had to be re-converted to DVCPro HD, conformed, and then re-exported or the edits won't stay put.

So at this point, I think I can say that in my view, MPEG Streamclip is not a viable conversion tool for generating clips intended for editing. Unpredictability, in itself, is enough.


www.derekmok.com

We use it all the time without issue. It's editing with the native H.264s that's weirdass. Sounds like a crappy system altogether there D.

MPEG Streamclip? So you use it to convert clips which are then edited? What is your format of origin?

When I use MPEG Streamclip to extract clips from DVD to go directly to an editing-friendly format (usually DV NTSC or Uncompressed SD), I also don't have problems either with In-Out slippage or the "impossible blown-up preview". So it could be a combination of H.264 source and MPEG Streamclip processing. When I start with H.264 media (eg. my Canon 60D footage), usually I'd use Compressor to convert, and I haven't had a problem there.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah, Canon 5D, 7D and 60D footage. We have a ProRes preset in MPEG Streamclip and it works really well. Try Export to Quicktime > Apple Pro Res 422, Quality 100%, Don't limit the data rate, and keep it unscaled.

Yup, don't think I've ever had or heard of any issue like that with edit media generated through MPEG Streamclip conversions, at least not personally or from the many folks I work with .. and that software is a daily staple for us. Weird.