I'm in San Antonio
 

I know this might be a little late but if you still need help let me know.

Matt, your posting implies there are a couple things going on here, but I have reason to believe there is but one problem (you can cut to the point by reading the last paragraph). You state that your project seemed to be fine until the audio went out of sync after a few weeks. There are numerous ways you can make audio go out of sync while working in Final Cut Pro, particularly if you like locking audio tracks. However, you have not provided enough information to diagnose whether this is the case. As a good workflow practice it is a good idea to archive a copy of your project daily, so that you can go back and see if things were out of sync earlier or whether the problem has been created.

You do not mention whether you have opened any of your suspect Media Clips in QuickTime to play them there. Do this with the original material on the G4. Do you have sync problems?

I suspect there have been sync issues from the beginning which you missed because you were concentrating on other elements. I also suspect the culprit is your Canon ZR70 camera as I have read numerous similar complaints from other users of this camera, particularly when footage was shot with a different camera. Try borrowing another camera, or better yet, renting a proper deck, and check your results. Please post any other details you might note as you trouble shoot your way out of this problem. Remember, thousands of people successfully use FCP every day. You can too. Good Luck!

Duane thanks for your advice. I watched the clips in quicktime on the G4 and they appear to be the slightest out of sync, by maybe a second or less.

That's news to me about the ZR70. It makes sense though because I did shoot w/ my GL2. I used the ZR70 to capture because I didn't want to stress my GL2 w/ FFW, RW, etc.

Unfortunately I don't have access to my GL2 right now (I'm in Portland for a few weeks and the GL2 is in California). I'll look into renting a deck, or I may just wait until I'm back home next week to use my GL2.

Do you suggest starting over w/ the GL2 to capture? I'm willing to start from scratch and lose my edits but I don't want to run into the same issue.

Capture set up
 

While I've heard a variety of ways to set up a capture device, an external HD, and a computer, I've never seen all of the suggestions in one place. Hopefullty this can clear it up for me.

Here is what I've been told:
1) Plug the cam into an ext HD, then the ext HD into the computer.
2) I've also been told this is not a good strategy because it's one more device that the footage had to go through.
3) I've been told to plug the cam directly to the computer and capture footage to the internal HD, then transfer it to the ext HD.

Does this last step result in linking issues w/ the media? If you set the scratch disk to the internal HD to capture the footage and then move it over to the external wouldn't FCP have problems finding the media once it's been transfered to the external HD?

I'm using an Canon ZR70 to capture and was informed in another of my posts that it may be the source of audio being out of sync. I want to make sure I have set it up correctly to capture in order to determine if is the problem.

I've seen all of those various methods work and I've also heard of all of those methods having capture issues. There are too many variables in software versions, OS versions, hardware versions, FireWire driver versions, etc. for there to be just one absolute method.

What method do you use?

Update
 

I used a deck to capture a few seconds and the footage came in sync. Looks like it was my inexpensive cam giving me trouble the whole time.

I have the oppertunity to rent the deck for $125/day, is that a resonabloe price? It's an older sony, not sure the exact model number.

Hunting around for advice: I can't get FCP 3 to reconnect image masks.

I exported a project to a disk using Media Manager and all of the media came through... but none of the stills that I use as masks are reconnecting. I can't seem to convince FC that it's missing these files. If I ask it to reconnect the sequence it only offers me online and not offline files.

Any hints?

Is the image you want to use in the mask part of the alpha channel in the photoshop file? I have success using an RGB image and selecting luminance as the key.

On my PB I usually capture to the internal drive and then use the media manager to move it to an external FW drive. On my G4 Power Mac I plug the camera into one FW port and capture to an external FW drive. At the school I teach at the students use all different methods, such as you describe. The footage going through various peripherals will not damage the data. But slower computers, with older FW busses may drop frames. PB 's can drop frames capturing to an external drive. It seems to depend on processor speed etc.

Thanks. I rented a DV deck for the weekend and it is such a difference compared to using a cheap dv cam to capture. It FFWs and RWs faster and finds specific points in the tape much faster. My ZR70 would take 10 seconds once it reached the time code that I wanted to find the exact point.

I rented the Sony DSR 40 and it works perfectly. One thing that I noticed is when I use the deck for audio play back it is in sync but when I use the computer's built-in audio it is out of sync. This could have been my problem the entire time but I'd hate to admit that - oh wait I just did. Back to editing!

problems with FCP and Western Digital external drive
 

Hi,

I have a powerbook G4 and I just got a western digital 120gb external drive (USB 2.0) to capture footage. Whenever I try to capture footage through the drive it stalls on Allocating Disk Space for about 7 minutes everytime. Is this a bad drive to use for this, or have I not set something up properly?

Thank you,
-Dan

USB 2 is usually a PC drive. How did you format it? Is it formated HFS+? Personally I would take it back and get a FireWire drive. They are much better suited for video capture.

Motion Compatability
 

Has anyone tried to run Motion using a video card besides the ones below?

ATI Radeon 9800 XT
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
• ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
• ATI Radeon 9600 XT
• ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
• NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
• NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra

If not, is this just Apples recommendation or will Motion not even run w/o one of these cards?

thank you
--adam