FCP3/Mac newbie alert

[Dave Morrison]

I tried this question over on 2-pop but with no luck so far. I hope you can help a Mac and FCP newbie. Here is my original question:

I've spent a couple days on this and I'm ready to plotz. I'm feeding my DV footage from my Canon XL1 into my G4 MDD Dual 1 gig with FCP3. I wanted to use the "Log and Capture" method of importing. My logging of the clips seemed to go fine but when I told it to capture all the logged clips, it would fail claiming timecode breaks. I tried this method repeatedly until I gave up and tried to do a "Capture Now" and dump the entire tape onto the HD. This capture gave me video that contained the original soundtrack along with a "beep, beep, beep" that ran the entire length of the capture. After an entire day of this "fun", I gave up and took the tape to my local AV house where they dubbed it onto a new DV tape thereby creating a new, uncorrupted timecode track, right? Well, I tried the new tape today and it STILL fails to import all the logged clips without skipping a few of them claiming loss of timecode. I'm really at my wits end with this. Can anybody give some guidance or ideas?

Thanks,
dave

[Ken Tanaka]

If you're using FCP 3 you can tell it to ignore timecode breaks via your preferences settings.

[Dave Morrison]

Tried that Ken. After the first capture failures, I turned off all of the warning messages and tried again....same problems. I watched the process while it was failing and it basically fast forwards right past the next "in" point and goes all the way to the end of the tape. Question: this camera belongs to the company I work for and I have no idea how much abuse it has suffered. I ran a cleaning tape through it but I'm not sure if the small battery in the camera has EVER been replaced. Would this battery have ANYTHING to do with timecode generation?

TIA,
Dave

[Ken Tanaka]

No, I think the back-up battery merely preserves the date/time/region settings.

Well, if all else has failed, one possibility is to try a capture through iMovie and then export to a Quicktime DV file. This was the old work-around for timecode breaks with the less-tolerant FCP2. iMovie is generally more forgiving; it assumes the user has no idea what s/he is doing...sometimes a great benefit for the best of us. The one hazard with this method can be that you may have to resample the audio for 48kHz before importing it into FCP3 (or change FCP3's timeline settings).

[Eivind Vaa]

I saw you mentioning that you managed to capture the video via "capture now", but that the sound came out with a lot of "beeps". Did you play the clip after having placed it on the timeline? If so, the beeps would indicate that the audio needs to be rendered for some reason. However, if you heard the recorded sound underneath the beeps, I have no idea what could be wrong.

[Joe Lloyd]

Did you accidentally select DV capture PAL? This would cause errors on capture. Also are you trying to batch capture from the beginning of the tape?

[Dave Morrison]

<<<-- Originally posted by Eivind Vaa : I saw you mentioning that you managed to capture the video via "capture now", but that the sound came out with a lot of "beeps". Did you play the clip after having placed it on the timeline? If so, the beeps would indicate that the audio needs to be rendered for some reason. However, if you heard the recorded sound underneath the beeps, I have no idea what could be wrong. -->>>

Hi Eivind,
I didn't move the clip at all. I simply played it in the window that it appeared in after the capture and it had the beeps. And yes, the original recorded sounds was clearly audible under the beeps. They were spaced approx. 1 second apart.

dave

[Dave Morrison]

<<<-- Originally posted by Joe Lloyd : Did you accidentally select DV capture PAL? This would cause errors on capture. Also are you trying to batch capture from the beginning of the tape? -->>>

No, it was set for NTSC. Yes, after the failure of the "log and capture" method, I tried to simply dump the entire content of the tape onto the HD and that's when I heard the beeps in the soundtrack.

To all who have written, thank you so much. I'm going to take another whack at this thing tomorrow. Do any of you know if the program updaters for FCP 3 have included anything that might address these issues? I'm hoping to have our IT Dept. install the updates on Monday.

dave

[Dave Morrison]

I don't know if anybody is still following this thread or not but I got a chance to talk to a guy from Canon at Macworld this week and he gave me a good lead on the problems I was having. He said that the break in the timecode was probably a result of the small internal button-cell battery being dead. This isn't a problem if you never remove the other power sources from the camera. However, when my rechargeable battery ran out and I shut down the camera to replace it, the internal battery couldn't keep the time code intact thereby setting my counters back to 00:00:00....or at least that's what it sounded like to me! Again, thanks to all who had suggestions for me and I'll see if the replacement cell takes care of my issues.

Dave

[Ken Tanaka]

Thanks very much for the follow-up, Dave. We get this type of problem reported from time to time and this is the first time I can recall the back-up battery being implicated. This will be a useful reference for others.

[Jeff Donald]

Post back your results with more system details (OS, ram, FCP version etc.) The beeping is usually an audio mismatch problem. Capture problems can also be related hard drive condition (amount of free space, fragmentation, etc.)

[Benjamin Harrison]

Also check the jumper settings on your scratch disk. I've pulled hair out because of the problems that can cause :)