OK – not a real discovery as such – probably well documented elsewhere, but we were chuffed to have found it!
The problem was two-fold. First, capturing footage from a camera needed a pre-set to match the camera. More often than not the sound would be out of sync by the time we got it onto the timeline. Secondly, putting the footage onto the timeline often meant we had to render it before we could edit it. Sigh.
First one was easy-ish. We simply had to understand that the camera was set to capture sound at 32Khz instead of the expected 48Khz. Making a capture preset based on 32Khz sound cured that one (of course, the camera is capable of 48Khz sound, and that will be the first thing I look into on Monday).
The second was a little more tricky. Looking at the footage, some of it went onto the timeline without the need to render, and some didn’t. There was obviously something different between the formats – and yet they all came from DV cams.
Looking more closely, we found that some of the footage was in DV PAL format, and some in DVCPRO PAL format. What on earth is the difference? Doing a little digging around (isn’t the Internet a brilliant thing?) I found this table to explain it. So how did we solve it…?
In the end it was simple – we figured out that the timeline really showed a graphical view of the sequence that we created… so we had to check the sequence pre-sets. What we found was that FCP creates sequences with different formats of DV, and where we imported footage that needed rendering, the sequence we put it into was a different format to the captured file. Easy, innit?
We just changed the sequence to match the file, lo and behold, the red render bars disappeared and off we went!
In fact we could save ourselves a lot of trouble by looking in the asset bin – the formats of the clips are all listed! We should have read the manual, shouldn’t we?
Anyway, Matt has been doing the editing, I’ve been concentrating on the encoding – we are both learning and that’s no bad thing!