Open Firmware Passwords

Here's a strange one: A friend of mine was editing some multicam footage and suddenly -apparently without reason- it started to severely choke his mac to the point where multicam footage would only play for about 2 seconds before giving up and announcing dropped frames. Literally two seconds.

I tried everything: rebooting, reconnecting his drives, repair disk, repair permissions, all the traditional troubleshooting steps. None worked. Then I tried a safe boot and it didn't take. The mac refused to boot into safe mode, so on a hunch I tried the firmware boot selector by holding down Option when the Mac booted and was prompted for an open firmware password.

So I turned off open firmware password by booting with an OS X install disc and then ran safe mode and zapped the Pram. The choking was gone. Multicam was working again.

So to determine if it was the open firmware password he set recently, I turned it back on and as I suspected multicam choked again.

Now, I'm not sure why but it's 100% consistent. No open firmware password and multicam works. Set an open firmware password and it chokes badly. He's using 4 separate firewire drives for his footage and media files so my only guess at this very strange problem is that somehow when the Mac boots having the firmware locked is preventing something between FCP and the Firewire bus or the drives.

I'm not sure. Any ideas?

HPX500 shows nothing to ingest

Yikes.

On rare occasions, media shot on a Panasonic HPX500 camera may not ingest in the Log and Transfer window. A warning “Error: No Data” appears.

I like Apple's use of the word "try" in the long resolution which you can read here. At its most basic, you change ingest prefs, sequence settings, import, load into a timeline, then export then re-import.

Perian versus AVCHD to ProRes

Apple mentions a problem I've had people ask me about.

AVCHD clips you transcode to ProRes from the Log and Transfer window are sometimes jumpy or distorted.

The solution from Apple is as follows:

This may happen if you installed the Perian QuickTime component. To temporarily disable Perian while using Final Cut Pro:

Open System Preferences.
Click the Perian icon at the bottom of the System Preferences window.
Select the General tab in the Perian preference pane.
Click Remove Perian.
If you would like to enable Perian after you finish working with your AVCHD clips, return to step four but click Install Perian to enable it.

Opening Old Projects in Motion 3 Problems

Symptoms
Projects created in Motion 2.1 or earlier that use filters including position parameters applied to a 2D layer may behave differently when opened in Motion 3. The center point of the effect may no longer remain with the underlying footage, but may move in the opposite direction.

Resolution
To restore the original behavior, follow these steps:

Open the project in Motion 3.
Choose Window > Layers.
Select the 2D layer in the Layers window.
Select the Groups tab in the Inspector.
Select the Fixed Resolution check box.
Save the project.

Yup. Doing this reminds me of Dan Lyons's great quote, "If your just going to repeat press releases, why have the press?"

Mac Mini with 3 GBs of Ram & FCP

Speaking of Ram, yes it is possible to have 3Gigs of Ram in a Late 2007 (Macmini 2,1) Mac Mini. So, if it's true that FCP can only address at maximum, 2.5 Gigs of Ram, then the Mac Mini is a viable editing platform for SD and maybe 2 streams of HD.

Although, multiclip editing would still be problematic unless you transcode I'm guessing.

Quick tip: Hold OPTION while you select the upper-left Apple menu and see "About This Mac" turn into "System Profiler..."

FCP Only Supports 12 Hour Long Clips or Timelines

Symptoms
Final Cut Pro does not support clips or sequences longer than 12 hours. Importing or capturing clips longer than 12 hours will produce the message "File Error: 1 file(s) recognized, 0 access denied, 1 unknown."

Resolution
Keep individual clip length to less than 12 hours to avoid this issue.

So sayeth Apple.

It's strange that that is the limitation given that some timelapses are far far longer than a mere 12 hours. I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned before. A friend of mine had a 24+ hour clip once and thinking about it I remember him mentioning a limitation like this. I wonder if it has anything to do with FCP only addressing 2.5 Gigs of ram at a time, if that still applies.

Digital Rebellion's Preference Manager's File Format

Digital Rebellion has three handy bits of software for various things regarding Final Cut Studio. One, called Compressor Repair, helps keep QMaster running, another, FCS Remover, is essentially an uninstaller for Final Cut and the third, called Preference Manager, backs up and restores your Final Cut preferences.

Today, I had a call to fix someone's badly behaving FCP install and since they weren't exactly savvy to the inner workings of the Mac when I suggested they trash FCP's prefs they had no idea what to do. So, I began to walk them through the process when I decided to just have them download and use Preference Manager. Playing along at home so I could tell them exactly what to do I noticed in Preference Manager's preferences that it allowed you to choose the directory where the backups were kept. But they were archived in a strange type of file called a .pmb.

Wonderful, I thought, another proprietary file format to worry about. Immediately I decided I didn't like this and lamented the day that FCP Rescue went away. I decided to find out exactly what these .pmb files are and see if they're useful on their own.

I fired up the Terminal, typed in File, hit spacebar and dragged in a newly created .pmb file and hit return to find out it's actually nothing more than a simple "Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract" .zip file.

So, to make these .pmb files useful when you need one and don't have or don't want to use Preference Manager, just append .zip to the end of one and then double click it to unzip it and there are all of your copies of your backed-up preferences.

Syncing Multipclips 1/100th of a Frame at a Time.

When you are positioning your playhead to the sync point of a clip (for example, for a multiclip sequence) that doesn't have synced timecode, or are just trying to get audio in sync or just need more precise control over where the playhead is in an audio clip in the Viewer, hold down Shift.

This will let you scrub and position the playhead in 1/100th of a frame increments. When you mark the In point you'll see FCP move things to the nearest frame to the point you positioned your playhead. It can help when you need precise sync and In point control. But this only works in Audio, not Video.

Multiclip Labels

Here's a quick handy tip.

I use labels extensively in FCP. Red generally meaning bad and green generally meaning good with other colors to indicate variances thereof. However, if you create a new multiclip and then highlight that multiclip in the Browser, then assign it a label, FCP will also likewise label the clips that comprise that multiclip and are also set as Video and Audio source in the viewer (even it they aren't loaded into the Viewer).

I'm not sure how handy this is, but since you can highlight a multiclip in the Browser, give it a label, and FCP will also label the clips choosen for Video and Audio so you can see which are being used -I guess- at a glance without having to open that multiclip and load it into the Viewer. Maybe not practically handy, but fun to know I suppose.

It seems a tad buggy at times, where you have to load the multiclip into the viewer to get some kind of labeling voodoo to reset if it only labels the multiclip itself but overall it works.

Multicam and Changing the Elusive Active Audio Source

This one still has me a bit stumped. Let's say you're editing a three-camera shoot, all nicely synced up and loaded into your timeline as a multicam edit. You've set your main hero audio source to underlay the entire piece and have either edited in real time or using Command + (numbers) once you've set your keyboard layout to multicam, edited your final cut cut-by-cut.

But there's one last thing left to do: you need to change the audio source, not the video source, of only some of the clips. How do you do this? As an example lets say you need to change one clip in particular so it uses another synced audio source. Say camera/angle 3 needs camera 2's audio feed rather than the hero main audio which was connected to camera 1. What do you do?

It took me some playing around but I found a way to do it while keeping everything in sync. I'm not sure if this is the correct way to do this, or it's just something someone forgot to put in a few tutorials but the secret is to highlight the video AND audio of your clip and hit Command + L to Link them.

What's this do? It will let you hit 1, 2, 3 or whatever angle number on your keypad and switch BOTH the video and audio of that clip. Then, once the audio source is from where you want it to be, hit Command + L again and to Unlink the clip's audio and video and then tap the camera angle you want it to be with the keypad.

Let's look at a hypothetical example. We'll say our hero main audio is from camera/angle 1. In our multicam timeline we have a clip that's camera/angle 3 and currently has audio from angle 1 but we need it (for whatever reason) to use and sync to angle 2's audio feed. Here's what you do (assuming you're editing with the multicam keyboard layout which is under the Tools menu):

01) Highlight both audio and video of the clip in the timeline and tap Command + L.
02) Hit the number 2 on your keypad and watch as both Audio and Video sources change in your timeline. (it may take a moment for FCP to update this if you have many angles loaded in the Viewer)
03) Now, our Audio source is correct but our Video source is not, so tap Command + L again to unlink them.
03) Tap the number 3 on your keypad and watch as only the Video source changes in the timeline.
04) Hit Command + S to save.

If there's an easier way I haven't found it yet but I'll keep looking. For now this is mostly painless.