Audio oddity with FCP

PeterWright wrote on 1/23/2008, 7:28 PM

A local animator did some nice superimosed animations for a project, and to finish it in Vegas I visited him with a Sony Mini DV VCR so he could output to tape via firewire from FCP.
Must admit his 30" Apple Monitor was rather nice, but ....

During output, a 23 sec passage in the middle of the 5 min programme had loud beeps, every half second. The timeline for the same part played ok, but whenever we output to tape through firewire the beeps were there. He didn't know what to do, so I told him to render the audio only for that passage, and I took it as a .mov file on a thumbstick and later spliced it back in with Vegas to replace the beeping part.

Has anyone encountered anything like this?

Comments

farss wrote on 1/23/2008, 8:53 PM

Hi Peter,
if the Mac guy didn't know what to do......
Certain he'd rendered the whole sequence before outputiing to tape?
You could have rendered the whole thing out to a .mov file and just burnt that to a DVD, so long as it's SD I'm 99% certain Vegas would have read it correctly, in fact if it's an animation not outputting it to DV might have given you a bit of boost in quality. If you're going to do more work with this guy then a small USB drive and a copy of Macdrive or whatever it's called would get both of you talking. I do recall seeing something about a new tool for OSX that lets Macs mount and read and WRITE NTFS volumes.
Where things get really sticky with FCP is HDV. However there's some light at the end of that tunnel too thanks to Cineform. One thing that can be overlooked with CF products, the one licence will give you both that PC and Mac version of the codec.

Bob.

deusx wrote on 1/23/2008, 10:08 PM

>>>During output, a 23 sec passage in the middle of the 5 min programme had loud beeps, every half second<<<

that's the encoded message every mac sends out to papa Steve when they feel threathened ( in this case outputing things for use in other NLE )

if you play it backwards, beeps say: "warning, warning, traitor detected"

PeterWright wrote on 1/23/2008, 11:28 PM

Thanks deusx - I'm surprised the Mac owner didn't know that!

Yes Bob, he had everything rendered before I arrived. Even if he hadn't, I would assume it would throw up a warning about rendering rather than going ahead with firewire output plus beeps.

Good idea about QT file on data DVD - I wasn't sure how compatible the "normal" render from FCP would be with Vegas, in fact when I got home the first thing I did was try out the rendered .mov audio file and was relieved to find it went straight into the timeline.

I'll keep that idea in mind - I may well use this guy again - he produced some beautiful superimposed flowers and fluttering butterflies over some garden video for a kid's production, and also some impressive motion tracking with a halo round a basketball as it was thrown and flew through the hoop.