This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] QT File from Avid through QT Pro chops beginning audio in FCP7?

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Re: [Avid-L2] QT File from Avid through QT Pro chops beginning audio in FCP7?

Okay short promos I can see your workflow not being such a time suck. I would on hour long shows so your very admirable scrutiny isn't generally possible. Fortunately I'm still delivering Tape masters as backup so I output to tape first which helps in finding issues and once that's done I bake the file. If possible I'll then ama the file and play it back through the Tek scope logging. Levels are rarely an issue except the occasional specular ringing that sneaks through the safe color limit. To date no one has ever flagged those.

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <cutandcover@...> wrote :

Occasional Tek scope playback in case I spot something and want to get a closer look. I'm not often in need since the FSI has decent metering - not fast like the Tek's, but you can program it to light up alarms for level overages and stuff, so it's easier than routing through to a Tek scope in another room. But I will do that error logging as well on more important (longer form) stuff. Most of my work is promos, so these are easy and short enough to pass my own QC before passing them along.

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 11:07 PM, bigfish@... [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I'm curious why you only occasionally pass the signal through the Tek scope. Don't you want to monitor the levels on everything for the entire program? I will have to look up video spec as I'm not familiar with it. I'm finding most people are quoting me from media info spread sheets when it comes to mono vs interleave stems etc...

I don't QC the captioning that is done at an outside facility that takes the caption file and inserts it. Lately though are main networks are doing the captioning themselves so we don't deal with that at all.

Your process sounds very thorough and I'm never given that kind of time. I envy your environment. I do my best to take my final file masters and ama link and play through Avid into my Tek 7020 with Avid's LTC out fed to the scope so it can log errors with time code.

I won't go into all the gory details but I've just spent an hour with test sequences of color bars, tone and the black title and they are all problematic. It may not be the title itself. With a two clip sequence of multiburst imported to prores and color bars imported to prores and 8 channel tone Avid generated. I can't get things right when I take the saved as QT ref into FCP7. If the video of a single clip of bars and tone and delayed tone doesn't work WTF? If I start the tone with the bars and put a 30 frame gap in the middle the initial tone is correct but after the gap the tone doesn't start at the right time. Then as I scrub through I hear the tone but the audio wave forms are several frames off even with a simple tone. Having never been much of an FCP 7 pilot I can't believe it always worked this wonky. Perhaps being on OS 10.8.5 which came out after FCP7 was EOL IIRC is a factor.

I have to agree about using FCP7 for QC but I'm trying to find out what their logic for using it is. Perhaps there is no logic just old habits die hard.

---In avid-l2@yahoogroups.com, <cutandcover@...> wrote :

Let's get this out of the way: no one should be using FCP7 in any kind of QC capacity. Consider that many times, FCP7 is known to misinterpret levels, field order, alpha channel or type, frame rate, etc. - why anyone would choose this software for evaluation is beyond me. Even if one were not aware of all of these possible pitfalls, surely you would not rely on a piece of software that reached its end of life years ago!

When I do any rudimentary QC, I am doing several things. First, I pass the file through VideoSpec. This gives me a rough readout of readable information from the headers of the file, which includes frame rate (constant or variable), codec, bit rate (constant or variable), tracks included, running time, etc. - all useful items. Then, I open in QuickTime Player to see what it says in its Movie Information and Movie Properties. Finally, I load it in AJA TV (since I have an AJA IO Express, this application is a simple no frills item that allows for direct output through the hardware). I play through, watching on FSI LCD, and occasionally pass the output through a Tektronix WFM 7000. I should note that pretty much NONE of these devices are failure proof. The Tek for example easily misses certain captions. To double-check captioning, I play out from one system and capture through another, then take the capture file and load into Adobe Premiere CC 2014/2015, which can decode and display caption data. So there's all that, and I'm only an online editor. If the next place I send it to doesn't have at least what I have, and they report a "problem", you bet I will be asking their signal chain. Often I've taken iPhone video of things working as they should to explain things to the next person why their method is failure prone. And don't get me started on how many of these people play and view on their computer desktops.

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 8:35 PM, bigfish@... [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

So I've tested the FCP7 problem files in VLC, MpegStreamclip, Adobe Premiere, Avid ama linked, and ProTools. What is currently the best test for universal acceptance of a .mov? Would something like the BM utility to lay off to tape or aja's similar software/hardware be a better way of validating a file?

I wonder if Tektronix Cerify or some other file QC software would flag whatever the issue is that trips up FCP7?