incorrect merged clips?

I know nothing about editing with sound. An editor showed me an FCP7 project that keeps breaking down. It has hundreds of merged clips. The sound sources are 48kHz-24bit .wav files. Should they have been converted to .aiff before the merging? In the source column in the browser, about half the merged clips give the sound source first, then the picture source ; the other half give them in the opposite order. I thought this strange. What does it indicate about the merged clips?

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

> It has hundreds of merged clips. The sound sources are 48kHz-24bit .wav files. Should they have been converted to .aiff before the merging?

If an FCP7 system can't deal with WAV files, then there's something bigger that's wrong with the system.

"Breaking down" how? Corruption? Media going offline? Choppy playback? Software crashes?


www.derekmok.com

Derek: The system is 10.6.8 on a 2012 MacPro. The machine passes a long hardware test. The drives are fast enough (and I've put the sound and pictures on separate drives). FCP7.0.3 was freshly installed and has been troublefree. The very same problems occurred in a 10.8.3 setup. Playback quits in one of the merged clips. Beachball spins forever. FCP7 can then be force quit, but the system can't shut down. After a depowering, the drives are checked with DiskWarrior: no problems. FCP7 prefs are restored to a backup.

I've no reason to suspect that .wav vs. .aiff is the source of trouble. It was on a list of possibilities.

The editor simplified the source filenames -- removing some potentially bad symbols. This didn't help.

I do wonder if the merging may have been done incorrectly because of the mentioned inconsistences in the browser.

Now everything's been moved to a new project, and the editor will test that project tomorrow.

Thanks,

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

My first guess would be a corrupt file, especially if the project quits on the same clip all the time. .wav and .aiff are both fine for use in FCP7.

If you can identify the bad clip, remove it at the finder level and see if playback improves.

Ach! Today FCP7 couldn't open the project at all and complained: the project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of final cut. (Special humor in that with FCP7 being the end of the line.) It looks like massive corruption on the hard drive containing the source videos and the latest project file. CRC error count is over 12000. I will track down whether this is due to the drive or the enclosure. It's eSATA. The PCIe cards seem OK, causing no such problems with other drives.

Salvaging underway.

Thanks, Derek and Jude.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

DISKWARRIOR!!

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytips:
Copy clip Attributes with Command-C
Paste selected Attributes with Option-V
Remove selected Attributes with Command-Option-V !

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Quote
dc
In the source column in the browser, about half the merged clips give the sound source first, then the picture source ; the other half give them in the opposite order. I thought this strange. What does it indicate about the merged clips?

nothing much.
sadly thats the way FCP is.
i really wish is was consistently video file first, then audio.
or most useful, two columns: one for video source, one for audio source.

maybe if the audio file starts sooner then the picture file the audio source displays first,
but i'm not sure there's a pattern.


nick

Nick, Right, it's nothing more than that.
Now knowing that the problem isn't about sound I can face it.
Thanks,

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany