100b Footage shot at 24p problems capturing to FCPX

C

climbupit

New member
I have a ton of tapes I shot on my DVX 100b several years ago and I now need to edit them. Since I took those years off this project, I've jumped from my old computer with FCP3 up to FCPX. And something is wrong with how I'm ingesting this footage.

It seems that no matter how I capture the footage, it always has a fierce audio drift where the audio/video synch doesn't last more than about 10 minutes. After replacing cables, trying different tapes (all shot at 24p), and replacing cables, I took the deck, cables, and HDD to a friend who was able to capture using Premiere with no audio drift (i.e. the hardware all works). The footage that I brought in from Premiere, however, has an odd color to it and very visible interlacing. I also downloaded a copy of Avid and it looks similar to the Premiere footage: while the audio drift is gone, there is highly visible interlacing and the quality seems degraded....

But there has to be a way to do this in FCPX! I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, but it seems like the pulldown is messing things up. I understand that the camera is recording 24p in a 60i wrapper at 29.97, and that there may be an issue between the Panasonic pulldown (2:3:2:3) and the FCPX pulldown (2:2:2:4), but I can't for the life of me figure out how to see or change the pulldown. I haven't installed Compressor, but do some people seem to be using that for a step in here?

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong or what a better workflow is for this? It's driving me crazy....

Thank you!

Peter
 
At a suggestion online somewhere, I imported the footage into FCPX into a Camera Archive and then pulled it into FCPX from there. This seems to have solved the audio drift issue (at least for the one tape I've done). Now, however, it's hanging on import: it says it's trying to Transcode and Analyze, but it sticks at 0% forever. (It did this before too, when I tried to import it directly.) I ended up canceling the Transcode and Analysis and the Rendering (both of which were hanging). Then I dropped the footage into a timeline and the little orange line showed up above it that it needed to render. I hit render, and it sticks at 0%. The timeline appears to be 23.98, as does the clip. The clip also appears to have some interlacing, but I can't tell if that's just because it hasn't rendered?

Any thoughts on this one? How do I get it to properly recognize and work with this footage? Do I need to run it through Compressor? I haven't installed that because I thought it was just for the final exporting stuff, but I certainly can if I need to.

Thanks,

Peter
 
I don't have any real answers, but over the winter I did import about 20 standard def tapes (mini DV 60i format) into FCPX. The only real problem I had was that FCPX would just stop importing every so often, so I had to monitor the process and restart it at times. I just captured real time with no camera archive.

You might post your question in the forums over at fcp.co - there are many super knowledgeable folks there.
 
Thanks for that. I am repeatedly reminded that this must work somehow!

I poked around some more and found this: https://discussions.apple.com/message/15562275#15562275#15562275 on the Apple Community Forums. It doesn't explain it, but it does provide a work-around, and that work-around worked for me last night. I had thought it was related to the tapes I was ingesting, but then I imported some footage from my 7D and it, too, was stuck at 0% Analysis. Kill FCPX and re-start, then cmd-click the clip (say that 10x fast) to choose analyze and fix and presto! It's going!

The whole thing has been super frustrating. Something about the 24p from tape in FCPX is not right, but the camera archive coupled with the kill-the-software-and-restart seems to be my workflow now.

Interestingly, the footage imported by Premiere worked well, but the footage I imported from Avid was horribly interlaced. Thankfully I seem to have gotten FCPX to do it directly.
 
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