NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2004

[Giuseppe Vetro]

hi
about one week ago' i made a short movie with fce2.When i exported the movie, fc didn't load normally (with the blue line running..).Infact, when i opened the movie, there were only the sound, but the image was freezing.After, i tried to erase my short movie from final cut and to reimport and re-edit it.that time fc exported the movie without problems.
Now, i've make another short video with fc, i try to export but the blu line running doesn't appear..it loads immediatly, without loading.When i open the video, i see another time the image freezing, and i only listen to the sound.
i've a dual 1.8 G5 power mac with 1 giga of ram.
Do you think i've a defective final cut??what is the reason of that probel??
I export with the option "make quicktime movie", so no compression.
please, help me to know what's the problem..i don't' understand!

p.s i also tried to delete the preferences, as suggested by another thread, but my short move doesn't' appear anymore...only sound!

thanks so much
joseph

[Heath McKnight]

I tried hitting reverse in the scrolling titles I made in FCP, but the titles themselves went blank and there was nothing there.

Any other solutions?

THANKS!

heath

[Mike Hanlon]

If you are using the simple scrolling text built-in to FCP (Video Generators->Text->Scrolling Text), there is a popup at the bootom of the Controls for you to choose the direction.

If you are using Title3D, then I think you must keyframe the position.


Mike.

[Heath McKnight]

THANKS! It says Up or Down, can't believe I didn't notice it before.

heath

[Ong Wan Shu]

hi all,

My system

iBook G4 1GHZ
768 RAM
80 G internal HDD
40 G 5600RPM external HDD
Final Cut Express 2
Firewire card that comes with iBook
PD150

My Problem: Ok i dunno which version my camera is, but i tried capturing in both NTSC DV and PAL DV and the capture is just not good...there are always drop frames, thus FCE stops captures. Why??? Is my system too slow??? I shot all my footage in 1/60 or faster shutter as its bright daylight.

I tried iMovie, it "'allow" the capture but i can tell there are drop frames and it sucks.

ALSO: when i do playback in the camera, the sound is not smooth, sometimes i hear it sometimes i dun. I believe its because its an old camera. but i am sure the footage is good because sometimes i hear the "full" audio during playback for the exact same footage IN the camera.

where is the problem?!?! Help!

[Mark Sloan]

Your system is plenty fast enough. The only problem might be the 5600 external FW drive...

Try capturing to the internal Hard Drive and see if you still have the problem. That will help narrow down what the problem is. If even your camera that you recorded the footage with is having problems playing it back, then you could try cleaning the heads with a cleaning tape. Are you reusing an old tape and re-recording over old footage?

[Boyd Ostroff]

My experience is that 5600 RPM drives are not fast enough for capture. In fact, an older 7200 RPM drive that doesn't have something equal to the Oxford 911 chipset may also give you problems.

[Glenn Chan]

You can get dropped frames if the firewire signal from the camera is not good. You can make it happen when you have the camera converting analog to DV on the fly and you take the A/V cable in/out.

Maybe something similar to that is happening? You could troubleshoot by capturing a good tape, or trying the camcorder in another computer.

2- Try capturing to the internal drive. Make sure it has over 15% space free.

[Rhett Allen]

Are you trying to capture to the firewire drive while it's in-line with the camera? Meaning, if you only have one firewire port, and the camera AND the drive are connecting to it daisy chained, it never seems to work. Other than that there are a bunch of settings you could look over to make certain they are correct. You shouldn't have any problems capturing to the built in drive either. DV only uses just over 3MB per second so in reality almost any drive should handle the capturing process, assuming everything else is in good shape and the tape is good (which coming from a PD-150 I think it should be as long as it's a good quality tape to start with). I never had any problems capturing to the 80Gig drive that came in my Powerbook and it was a 4200RPM.
Try capturing to the internal hard drive and see if it solves the problem.

Hello all,

Okay, here's the situation... I shoot wedding video's. I've never had a problem with downloading the footage I take to my G5's for editing in FCP. I shoot with Canon GL2's, use Maxell (DVM60SE) mini DV tapes, and clean my video heads when the cameras tell me to.

Today while downloading footage from 2 weddings I did over the weekend, something strange happened. While importing, all that was showing over 3/4's of the screen was a frozen scene from the particular wedding reception the tape was used to record that evening, and on the right 1/4 at the beginning of the tape showed what was supposed to be playing back all pixelated... w/o any better terminology for it. There's a link at the bottom of this message with actual video of it... but read the rest of this before you check it out.

I figured out that at a certain point, the video begins to play fine at roughly 27 minutes into the tape. From there on out, for the final 33 minutes, perfect footage. No problems. Whenever I tried to go back to within the 'problem' 27 minutes, the frozen image shown on the left 3/4's would be whatever I played last with no problem, and the right the pixelated stuff. The same camera was used to shoot the footage that turned out fine. The tape was a brand new tape... I never recycle. So, what in the world could be the problem?

I'm absolutely stumped, and scared to be honest with you! The 'problem' footage covers all of my staging scenes before the ceremony, the processional and a handfull of 'cut-in' shots.

Give it a look-see (need Quicktime):

http://www.buerhausdesign.com/problem2.html

Can this footage be saved? Can I save it? Can somebody else save it? What do you think the problem was/is?

I'm completely lost, and need a solution... if there's one to be had.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Matt

[Mark Callahan]

I've created a 23 minute film om FCP HD that I exported using the "QuickTime Movie" option with chapter markers and self-contained movie selected. FCP exports the movie fine, but when I try to open the movie in QuickTime Pro, or FCP, I get an error message that says:

"Couldn't open the file "Whole Movie" because an unknown error occured. The number of the error is -2125"

I checked apple's support site and all the error codes I found pertain to OS 9 or earlier. I tried restarting and that didn't help either.

Any ideas? I can export other movies fine, but this sequence is screwed up for some reason.

[Tim White AU]

G'day all,

I'm running Final Cut Pro HD on my G5, which runs through my camcorder to a PAL monitor...

It's happening for a while now, and has only started to bother me a lot today, but the image literally skips every second. I thought it must be a frame rate issue of some type (and I'm sure it still must be), so I set Sequence and Capture Preset to DV PAL 48 kHz, yet the image still jumps.

It is especially noticable with fast movement, and the frame will literally jump forward and looks very poor.

Any ideas as to what it could be?

[Arnaldo Paixao]

Hi Matt.

Believe me, I do share your agony. I also shoot weddings and I know that horror feeling when things like these happen.

Now, some thoughts:

You say "...and clean my video heads when the cameras tell me to." --> Maybe when they tell you, it's too late. In my humble opinion you should clean them more frequently (I do it at least every 4 or 5 shoots).

Have you tried to shoot any more with that camera on another tape?

One thing (I'm only speculating) that could of hapened: The video heads where dirty and the tape slowly cleaned them untill minute 27 when good recording started.

If this is the case and you footage is in fact ruined, talk to the B and G and explaine them that your equipment had a malfunction. Ask for their help, you'll be surprised how people react when they see that you are beeing honest with them. Ask them if some of the relatives taped the event with their cameras. Get hold of those tapes and try to get also the still fotographs. Be creative, do a mix of the best footage from the relatives's tapes, some stills and good music.

Please tell us how all come through. I hope all ads up to you.

Best regards and good luck.
Arnaldo

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

Have you tried playing the tape on another deck?

[Vic Owen]

This has been a problem with some of the Canons for some time. I had a similar problem with my XL-1 -- it took a head replacement to fix it. I saw horizontal banding, pixelating, etc. Typically, after 15-20 minutes into the tape, everything was fine. That included using, among others, new Panasonic MQ Master tapes, so it wasn't a tape issue.

It might be possible to recover your material with a VCR that has Dynamic Motion Control -- the DSR-1600, DSR-1800 & DSR-2000 all have this. It's "iffy", though.

I'd like to be more encouraging about this, but my experience was not a good one until the drum change.

I'd get the camera into Canon ASAP.