Playback oddity in DVDSP

In a recent project, I ran across something I've not seen before: Three clips were identically encoded and laid into Track 1 in their order. Individually, each clip was fine, but end-to-end the "following" clip would fail to fade in. Stopping playback brought the clip back to normal, when played it from its start it would fade in, but when played through from the previous clip it would remain black. This was true in both track playback and simulation.

Has anyone else seen this? I routinely follow this workflow and this is a first for me. Am I overlooking something? If there is a scenario that will cause this, I'd love to hear it.

Tom, not sure I'm going to be much help.

First, you can encounter many "oddities" in simulation. Did you try a test build to see if the same thing happens in DVD Player?

Second, I'm not sure what you mean by the clips failing to fade in but remaining black. Do you mean that your videos were edited with a fade at the beginning or are you asking DVDSP to do that for you? By remaining black, are they cutting in a few seconds later or staying black? Any audio while this is happening?

bob rice
frameworx media

Thanks for the response, Bob.

This isn't a cry for help, it's an oddity I observed that I couldn't explain but could duplicate within the project. Because of time constraints and being "on the clock" at a customer site, I didn't try an build or a new project.

I routinely break longer sequences into several shorter segments so that rework is minimized if there are any issues with the footage. The segments normally fade to black at the cut lines for ease of assembly. All this is done in the FCP timeline. Then the segments are output and batch encoded.

In the case I observed, the "following" clip would not respond in playback until the playback stopped. The playback system was a dual 2GHz G5 with adequate RAM and disk resources. The timeline in DVDSP was simple (one angle for video, one for audio, no subtitles or the like) but would not play back accurately in either simulation or track playback. It was fine in frame stepping. The audio always played back fine, the video was 29.97 fps dv encoded as MPEG-2 in Compressor. No tricks.

I worked around the issue by placing the clips on separate tracks and linking them. When I was certain there were no more changes coming, I went back and consolidated all the clips in a single FCP timeline, re-encoded, and took a single clip into DVDSP for the Build. No problems.

Again, my curiosity as to the "bad actor" on this the motive for the post. Anyone?