annoying fcp/exporting problems
 

This is a long one folks. Let me start at the beginning.

I'm working on a project where we interviewed 30+ people and have to cut the footage together into 30+ neat little packages. I've been exporting from FCP to a FCP QT reference movie using "current" settings, and taking that movie into cleaner to create WMV files.

For the most part, this works fine, but some of these, 7 out of the 30+ so far, have been exporting to WMV out of sync (mostly slightly, like 5 frames, one not so slightly, about a second). These are IN SYNC when viewed in FCP on the timeline, AND viewed in a reference movie, and even in a full self contained QT movie, AND in a h.264 QT movie created with QT conversion from FCP. It's only when finally exporting to WMV that these files have issues.

We cannot figure out why this is. I mostly captured them myself on an HDV deck from DVCAM source footage, across 5 different tapes, using "capture now" because there's some unknown setting that causes "capture clip" and "batch capture" to capture footage out of sync or to give us "searching for timecode" break errors when no time code break exists. Capture now was the simple workaround. So we thought.

After several other ideas, I found that for some reason, recapturing the footage the exact same way, and reconnecting the media in the timeline to the newly capture footage, instead of the originally capped footage, solves the sync during WMV export issue, but NOW we've got an issue where all the cuts don't line up exactly right. . .they're a few frames off.

So, I either have to export out of sync footage, or recapture, reconnect clips in timeline to recapped footage, and then go in and manually tweak every edit so it's where it's supposed to be.

Troubleshooting stuff we've tried, none of which help: I normally had 15 frames of black before and after the interview, just empty timeline space. tried filling this with actual slug.

Tried exporting from FCP to different QT formats, THEN to WMV, still out of sync.

Checked TC settings, everything appears to be non drop across the board--on the tape, sequence settings, etc.

tried comparing the timecodes from the originally capped footage to the recapped footage--the same frames appear to have the same timecodes.

Tried changing the sample rate on the WMV setting we were using from 44KHZ to 48 since that's what the FCP settings are (DV NTSC 48Khz)

So, any ideas why all this happening?

PS, I can't troubleshoot right now as this is a system at my work office. I can try stuff tomorrow. Thanks.

Tried having no empty space before interview

Give Flip4Mac a try instead of cleaner for windows media files, and see if that solves your problem.

good idea. but it didnt work. however flash/f4v file created in adobe media encoder worked fine.

Try DV Kitchen as well.

thanks but i think we got it. recapping using the exact same in and out and using capture clip, and then reconnecting the fcp clip to the newly capped footage seems to work. edits are where they should be and wmvs are in sync.

OKay I lied. That worked for one interview. Next guy I relinked to the newly capped footage was off by 2 frames on every clip. . .I selected everything and slipped it and that seemed to do the trick.

Next guy that I haven't resolved yet seems to be off different amounts on each clip, may have to do him manually.

Doing "capture clip" doesn't always work. . .some clips keep digitizing out of sync ( half a second or a second) even after two or three tries, while others are fine the first time.

I'll see if that DV kitchen thing is an option.