Audio on clips dissappearing

[Bitboy]

Hi.

I tried and confirmed a problem that a former colleague of mine has with SpeedEDIT. Moving clips after the 13th hour mark on the timeline and sound is gone. POOF! Works at the 12 hour mark.

He had captured a lot of tapes and threw them into the timeline at various points so he could chop them up and construct a project with them. I must admit spreading clips over a 40 hour timeline seems a little insane - but hey nobody told him he couldn't do it :D

So what's the verdict out there? Anyone tried this and got the same results?

Also another thing that bothers me is that a project cannot be an uneven number of pixels in height - causes completely green output (using different codecs). And the project width must be a number divided by a factor of 16. I thought this was resolution independent? ;)

Enough of all the problems. Still love SE but would love to get these things fixed. Audio is the worst thing of these I've mentioned.

And pardon me if this has already been mentioned elsewhere. I haven't followed the SE forums for some time 8/

[SBowie]

Moving clips after the 13th hour mark on the timeline and sound is gone.Good catch - don't forget to submit that as a bug report.

Also another thing that bothers me is that a project cannot be an uneven number of pixels in height - causes completely green output (using different codecs). And the project width must be a number divided by a factor of 16.Hmmm - I think you'll find a lot of software has similar limits, because a lot of codecs balk at oddball resolutions. (I know for sure that some of the online streaming video services decline uploads with odd number dimensions, too.)

[Bitboy]

Good catch - don't forget to submit that as a bug report.

Completely forgot - is there a specific way to do this? Like the LW9 OB bug report or?

[SBowie]

Completely forgot - is there a specific way to do this? Like the LW9 OB bug report or?There's a menu item for bug reports in the NewTek group in the Windows Start menu, Michael.

[Bitboy]

Oh had not seen that one - the link only said Newtek SpeedEDIT Support (Web) :) But got it submitted now. Thanks Steve!

[SBowie]

No problem, Michael. I was happy to see you surface again, so since I omitted saying it then, I'll say it now - welcome back! :)

[Bitboy]

Hehe. Thanks Steve! Been lurking mostly in the Lightwave forum and beta forums here and contributed some also. Haven't had much to use SpeedEDIT for yet.. A few odd jobs here and there.. But I'm showing it to someone tomorrow as they use Premiere and ran into some problems. We're gonna test to see if the output from SpeedEDIT is better.. :)

[ScorpioProd]

Please do let us know the conclusions and the parameters involved in the testing, Michael.

[Bitboy]

Ok, it's pretty simple really:

1) Take any clip and place it after the 13 hour mark and when playing it back there's no sound from the clip. This is also the case with audio files as I just tested with a 5 minute audio track as well.
2) Move it to the 12th hour mark and there's suddenly sound on the clip/audio file.

This was with a 3 minute clip I tested with in the timeline just to see if I got the same problems as my former colleague. He used AVI DV clips (and a lot of them) and showed me the problem with no sound when playing back. So I'm curious to know if some here see a different result with SE - more to get this confirmed or to figure out if the problem is elsewhere. But for now I'd go with a bug in SE since we both had the exact same problem.

So conclusion: something is wrong in the playback of audio around and after the 13th hour mark on the timeline in SE.

Sorry Eugene - it's rather late here, I'm tired and I COMPLETELY missed the point that you referred to the Premiere/SE testing.. Wrote this sentence afterwards.. :p

[Gordon]

I must admit spreading clips over a 40 hour timeline seems a little insane - but hey nobody told him he couldn't do it :DShould we be drawing straws in order to pick someone to tell him the bad news? :) Actually, it is good that he tried to do that because many of us would not be even trying a project that long because we grew up with the experiences of editing short video segments, losing projects and having to start over. The shorter the project the less to lose if something (hardware, software, power outage, etc.) goes wrong.

He will also find that SE is much much faster if he can break the projects into much smaller chunks anyhow. It's not just the time and the scanning the files for audio waveforms and icons; he's also going to have a problem once he cuts it all up and has a lot of clips. Depending on system resources it can happen at 500, 750 or 1000 clips but eventually he won't be able to tolerate the waiting for the interface to keep updating because he has so many clips.

Also another thing that bothers me is that a project cannot be an uneven number of pixels in height - causes completely green output (using different codecs). And the project width must be a number divided by a factor of 16.
The even lines required in video is for compatibility with interlaced formats like SD and HD television. All interlaced video needs two fields hence an odd number of pixels in height is not tolerated by almost all video editing software. Most software will allow changes by two pixels but fill the missing scanlines with black or crop the extra lines or scale it to required sizes.

The divisible by 16 has also been around forever and this one I'm not sure about. Even though being divisible by 16 was preferred, I thought I ran across some video software programs where you could get away with divisible by 8 or even 4. I suspect that again it is a legacy issue of SD video being 720 pixels wide and needing to scale, crop or fill to match.
I thought this was resolution independent? ;) ... Enough of all the problems. ...
There has to be limits drawn somewhere so that SE remains compatible with other software such as DVD authoring and so that SE remains compatible with other hardware like existing cameras, recording decks and video players. I would classify the above items as reasonable limitations not problems. Of couse that is a subjective and time sensitive observation. What is reasonable to one person may not be reasonable to all and what is acceptable today is no longer acceptable tomorrow. There was a time when the head of a software company said "No one should ever need more that 640K of RAM" and now that same company make an OS that requires 3 thousand times (3125 actually) as much RAM just for the interface to run smoothly.

[Bitboy]

Thanks for the insights Gordon. Mostly this was concerns from my former colleague as I rarely have problems with specific project sizes. I adapt easily. ;) He does not write on the forums so I volunteered to write this on his behalf :)

And the width and height limitations make sense now when reading what you wrote about it.

On another note, the Premiere issues that I tested with another editor today, was simply that the red colors used in their video (company logo is red) looked awful in Premiere. We got pixel steppings and awful quality with standard DV. The reason was that he chose DV PAL project settings (and Premiere renders internally to the project settings instead of doing uncompressed like SE until export) and that gave those color/pixel problems. We changed the project to DVCPro50 PAL and it went away. Easy fix :)