Audio not rendering... But FCE knows it's there

[Kevin Randolph]

Okay, I videotaped a training and the guy giving the presentation had a video that he put in the Power Point to start things off. So now I'm trying to import the video into FCE 2 and put it at the beginning of the training video.

The file is an MPEG-4. It imports to FCE fine, plays in the viewer, sound plays - life's basically good. So I drag it down to the timeline. It now needs to be rendered, that's fine I need to resize it anyway. BUT, the video resizes and renders fine and the audio, no matter what I try will not render.

2 stereo tracks are in the time line, and play when the selection is scrubbed through. But they will not render. I thought maybe it was a 44.1k to 48k problem so I opened up the file in Quicktime and converted it (audio and video). Then I imported this new file into FCE which gave me a "general error."

The only way I found to make this work was to export the audio only as a 48k .aif file and then import the MPEG-4 and the AIF files separately, line them up in the timeline and not use the audio from the MPEG-4.

Does anybody have a clue why the audio of the MPEG-4 wouldn't render? I tried every place in the menu that even looked like it might render something with no luck.

Thanks,
Kevin

[David W. Jones]

Convert the Mpeg4 into the proper file for editing in Streamclip.

[Michael Liebergot]

Final cut does not like compressed audio, especially MP3 audio, which MPEG4 basically is.

You must convert your audio to 48hz for export.
Just right click your audio on the timeline and export it to Soundtrack Pro and convert your audio to 48hz., save and send it back to FCP.

You could also use ITunes to convert your audio if needed as well.

Then render out your video as normal, and you should be good to go.

[Kevin Randolph]

Thanks for the help. All's well now...