Several issues with FCP

Hello Everyone,

I am a nubie here but have been editing with FCP since 1999. (Took 4 years off to figure out how to cure a tumor in the brain, using natural medicine, &, as you see, it works. I have a 30 page ebook coming out on it shortly.)

I have some issues now that seem to be buggy. I never put my editing computer online.

I am on 10.6.2
2X2.26 QUAD CORE INTEL XEON
6 gig Memory.
FCP 7.0.1 I do not want to upgrade until I am finished with 3 documentaries that I edited on.

1) I am getting the rainbow pinwheel everytime I click the mouse in FCP :dry: . Never did that before.
It is only doing this in FCP & I editied a short film on The Dome of Grizzly flats, om 3gp, a few months ago, & did not have this problem. I don't think that the converter, idealshare works with this Version of FCP. or my O/S.

2) I used the quicktime pulldown to convert mp4 from android to .mov. DOES NOT Work in FCP.
Just downloaded a converter. Does apple have a converter?

3) I have to do command O to open all files. I have tried to find in preferences, where I would change that to double click, & I cannot find it.

4) The films that I started on in 2002 have many different aspect ratios & rather than strech, or distort, making some scenes look strected, is there a way to match frame?

Thank you & Happy Holidays, to all.

Well there's a whole raft of problems.

Firstly you're right to not upgrade mid - project. Leave all as is and try to sort your problems out now (though you won't be able to upgrade much with the machine you have anyway...)

Pinwheel - could be anything from a disk on the way out to corrupt media. So I'm assuming you have all you media on a separate HD from your system (OS) drive? Are any of the disks full? That will sometimes do it. You could also run Disk Utility and verify and repair permissions on all drives.

Quicktime pulldown? Dunno what that is. You could try MpegStreamclip ( www.squared5.com ) to convert, it's a pretty decent converter. Be wary of converters you find by googling - often they're not so good.

Double clicking to open is standard AFAIK so I'm not sure. Check your prefs under mouse (if you're using a mouse)

Aspect ratio - well you're kinda boxed in on that one. The choice is between widescreen (assuming they're SD not HD) or 4:3. You really need to think about what best serves the film. If it's 90% 4:3 and 10% wide, think about finishing 4:3 and cropping the wide stuff. 50/50 is a harder call I'd personally go wide as most people now watch in that format.So you can either blow up the 4:3 material to fill the screen, or live with black bars (or some other convention - such as a blurred, stretched image behind the main one as filler) but there's no artful compromise.

Just wanted to share a pix of Christmas in California.

This was shot on the android camera.

I am going back to shoot it in full HD tonight.

Happy Holidays

Bonnie

Jason

Still the same problem with clips converted. Pinwheel of death.

You know the drill: "The Minions have to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, or nothing will work."

I am just going to reshoot it on my HD camera.


I was trying to get this Christmas Video out for all the Christmas Lights lovers,
but Scrooge got in the way.

Moral: Never shoot anything on an android unless you are prepared to
upgrade every time there is one.


Cheers.

Hello Jason & all,


Got is done, & up on tube just in time for Christmas eve.


Here is a link if you would like to see her:




Happy Holidays, everyone, & thank you for you help.


Bonnie Ember

Thanks for sharing the video. Good luck with your film project. Happy Holidays!