NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2002

[Rob Moreno]

Thanks for the advice, Ken. I'll give those filters a try. It's a shame that I need to put in all this extra work just to make the end product less appealing to the audience. ;-(

[Curtis T. Stoeber]

I've been lurking here for awhile and I think this is probably the best place to ask this.

I have the Academic version of Final Cut Pro 3.0.2 (I'm a student, shoot me now) and am using it in Mac OS X 10.2.2. I am trying to create a dissolve between a simple live action shot and a simple pre-rendered animated title (no sound). When I go to render the program crashes nearly every time. Sometimes it will even get up to 90% rendered before it crashes. I have been able to do this just fine in Final Cut Pro 2. And yes, my animated title is the same size and speed as my live action shot (720x480, Quicktime DV codec, 29.97fps etc). I switched the sequence to "always render in RGB" but the rendering quality seems lower for some reason when I do that, but it doesn't crash.

Anybody have any suggestions I might be able to try?

[Ken Tanaka]

Glad to have you join us!

Well yours is a difficult question and will be hard to precisely pin-down. Since you only indicated problems when rendering I'm going to assume that all other operations seem to work normally, eh?

My approach to tracking down such problems, in general, is to try to figure out what the program's really doing behind the scenes. In the case of a render operation FCP is reading your footage files and writing "synthetic" footage files that contain facsimiles of the modified footage frames. So the first attribute I'd look at is where those render files are being written to. To do this, open your project and go into Preferences then look at the Scratch Disks tab. Is the disk to which the render files are being written full or nearly full? Do you have access to another internal disk or Firewire disk? If so, try changing the location of the "Video Render" setting to that disk.

If you don't have a 2nd disk, I'd recommend exiting FCP, deleting all of your project's render files from the location (specified on the settings found above), empty your trash, and then try re-rendering your affected sequences. I'm betting that something funky's going on with respect to either your disk space or within a render file. BTW, what type of Mac are you using?

(In general, it's best to keep all of your media and render/scratch files off of your main system drive, using a 2nd internal drive or Firewire drive if possible.)

Let us know if this has any effect on your problem.

p.s. Absolutely nothing wrong with being a student around here, Curtis. In fact it's a great place for students!

[Curtis T. Stoeber]

Thanks for the reply. My student comment was made to put me out of my misery, not to defend my status. :)

Anyway, I have a dual 1 Ghz "Mirrored Drive Door" Mac with 512 megs of Ram and all that good stuff. It is fairly new and I have not yet had the time to buy another internal drive, but that is definitely on the list. I have quite a bit of remaining space on the drive, 71.51 gigs in fact. I was working on this project a few weeks ago and it crashed doing the same thing. I just wrote it off as one of those things that happens sometimes. Since then I have run Diskwarrior and defragged (optimized?) the drive. Also since then I upgraded from 10.2.1 to 10.2.2.

What is odd is that once it DID complete the render just fine. It also completes rendering between other clips without any problems. It's just when the rendering is involving a Quicktime that I made from Ray Dream Studio (in OS 9). Sometimes the render gets to 90% or so and sometimes it crashes at 10% or even right away. It almost seems like a CPU issue perhaps. And these Ray Dream Quicktimes are handled effortlessly in FCP2 and 1 in OS 9. I would use FCP 2 except I like the color correction in FC3 in OS X.

[Ken Tanaka]

OK, next question. What codec are you using to produce the QuickTime clip from Ray Dream? I'm imagining that it's some sort of 3D animation, no?

[Curtis T. Stoeber]

Yes, it is animation. Ray Dream Studio allows me to export in any Quicktime format available. I always render at 720x480 and 29.97fps etc. The codec is Quiktime DV NTSC. Colors=Millions (according to Quicktime).

[Jeff Donald]

Upgrade to FCP 3.0.4, it's free. Download it from the Apple site. Is everything on one large partition of your hard drive? Read in the manual about setting up to render in YCrCb. The only difference between it and RGB render should be the color space and not a quality issue. If your project was created in an older version of FCP it may not render in YCrCb or it may need to be updated. Moving to FCP 3.0.4 may solve a lot of your problems. It has for many users.

Jeff

[Curtis T. Stoeber]

I didn't know 3.0.4 was available, but that seemed to do the trick! In fact, I don't seem to need to even render simple things like dissolves anymore! Thanks for the help guys! You know it's always good when the original poster of a thread ends up using an exclamation point at the end of every sentence! That means he/she is happy!

[Ken Tanaka]

I guess this just reinforces the apparent rule of thumb for digital editing:

When all logical solution paths fail, reinstall or upgrade!

Delighted to hear all's well now.

[Rik Sanchez]

I didn't have enough for a powerbook but instead got the new 800 mhz 12 inch iBook. This is my first laptop, I'm still getting used to the keyboard. I"m off in about an hour to use it on a photo shoot and once I get FCP on it then I'll edit on the go in RT Offline mode, can't wait!!!

[Ken Tanaka]

Good for you, Rik! Let us know how your iBook works out. I'm sure many folks would dive at a cool-looking iBook if they were assured that it would work well for editing with FCP.

[John Locke]

Can anyone tell me how I'm supposed to mixdown the audio in FCP? There is a command in the menu for mixdown audio...but that isn't doing what I thought it would.

When I'm compressing using Cleaner, my final output file sizes are still way too big...even for high quality settings (85mb for a 6 minute 320x240 movie...black and white no less). Adrian said he figures that it's due to my having multiple audio tracks after adding music, lots of layered foley, and the regular stereo audio from the video footage itself. So, I started looking for a way to mixdown the audio to one track...and don't see how it can be done.

Any other advice on how to knock the file sizes down without losing too much quality?

[Rob Lohman]

I assume you are exporting to QuickTime. If so, open the quicktime
file with the quicktime player and check its audio & video properties.
This can tell you:

1. how many tracks you actually have
2. what the datarate for each track is

Then you can see if this is a problem or that you just need
to find a better codec/compression. What codec are you using?

[Paul Sedillo]

<showing a complete lack of knowledge>

Wouldn't it be better to do the audio work in a program other than FCP? From everything that I have read, FCP is not the best at handling audio. My projects have not required more than 4 tracks, so I am very curious as to the limitations of FCP (ref. audio).

[John Locke]

Rob,

Actually, I never export to QuickTime. I export it raw as an FCP file. Then, import that into Cleaner. The quality turns out a lot higher that way. Cleaner lets you set the ouput of the audio, but Adrian said he thinks that if I mixdown my audio prior to exporting to Cleaner that that will drop the file size substantially.

Paul,

I've tweaked certain clips in Peak then imported those into FCP projects, but overall I've used FCP to do almost all my audio. It's got all the "basic" tools and filters. It's just limiting when you want to go beyond the basics. So far, I haven't needed to. I'm sure an audio expert could take my FCP audio and do wonders with it in another program, but I don't know enough about other audio editing programs to do anything over and above what FCP can do (with the exception of some special effects).