FCP 4 audio frustration
 

I've done a few shorts now with FCP but I've encountered a new problem I've never had before.

I was placing DV clips into a sequence (and all was well) when all of a sudden any new clip I added was silent. They had sound in the Quicktime player and I could see the waveform in FCP until I rendered the audio and the line would go flat.

I've since restarted, unplugged the FireWire and opened a whole new project. I can import and render the audio of the DV clips but the audio still won't play, even though I can see a healthy waveform in the audio track.

Anyone have any suggestions? I don't know what to do.


-j

Jay -

Strange! I'd have to know more about what FCP and QuickTime versions, what OSX flavor, what kind of scratch disk setup, before I could come up with useful notions.

Right away, it sounds like an FCP-QuickTime mismatch. If your QuickTime is say 7.x and you're still in FCP 4.x, you may encounter problems.

I run FCP 4.5 with QuickTime 6.0.5 under OSX 10.3 (Panther).
I run FCP 5.1.1 with QuickTime 7.0.4 under OSX 10.4 (Tiger).

I had audio dropout under FCP 5.1.1 until I stopped sending audio renders to my my internal ATA drives. Renders of any kind are actual DV files like any you capture, they're just generated by the system, and should be treated as the same kind of higher-demand media.

HTH
- Loren

I don't know what happened (or how to prevent it from happening again) but trashing the FCP prefs seemed to do the trick. Thanks for the advice on the mismatch though, I'll keep it in mind.


-j