Final Cut Pro 6 has the ability to batch capture DV footage and separate clips by breaks in the time code. It’s far better to burn consistent time code before using a tape (striping or rewinding a bit) but if you’ve inherited media with inconsistent time code you may not realize how FCP handles certain nuances.

Time Code Break

Time code break detection works as expected: a new clip is created at the break, assuming a new shot was intended.

Blank Tape Detection

Suppose you have a DV tape without any time code and you have portions of unrecorded tape (i.e.: black between shots). FCP will treat these blank portions as time code breaks even though there is no time code.

The same is true for media with time code breaks and black breaks.

How Does FCP Assign Missing Time Code?

If your source media is sans time code Final Cut Pro will add its own. I’ve noticed it assigns Hour 12 and higher to such footage although I’m not sure why it chooses that number. This makes it easy to spot in the Browser.

I wrote about this topic before but it’s worth another post based on the frequency I’m asked about buying a new Mac.

The Mac product line is pretty well structured. The most powerful devices end with the word “Pro” and everything else is a good performer based on your preference of an attached monitor. If you’re a Windows gamer, it’s no contest: you need a Pro model.

However, the more important issue is when to buy your Apple product whether it’s a MacBook, iPod, Cinema Display, or iPhone. Apple releases new and updated products at MacWorld in January and June with product refreshes at points throughout the year.

Apple doesn’t usually change product pricing once a product is released (the first gen iPhone broke this rule) so don’t hold your breath for a cheaper MacBook Pro in June. Instead you’ll get a MacBook Pro with faster CPU, bigger hard drive, multi-touch, or whatever else Apple throws in for the same price as last year’s MacBook Pro.

Back to timing your purchase… Never buy an Apple product within 2-3 months of MacWorld or risk the disappointment of having last year’s feature set and performance. If your circumstance dictates a new device (ie: your MacBook Pro fell into the toilet) then do what’s necessary to get up-and-running.

The best resource for timing your Apple purchase is the MacRumors web site. Their Buyer’s Guide tracks the last product update, news items, and their opinion on when to buy.

I’ve got a plethora of external hard disks attached to my MacBook Pro. One for my personal media files and Time Machine and another two for video editing. At some point the drives go into sleep mode which proves an aggravation in Final Cut Pro because they need to spin up after their slumber.

The Energy Saver preference pane has an option to “Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible” which I unchecked. The drives no longer spin down but this means constant whirring of motors and fans when the MBP is doing nothing.

An ideal solution is using AppleScript to control hard disk sleep mode when using Final Cut. Although I haven’t found an existing script for this I did find two tools to modify the sleep timer.

A tip from MacRumors suggests using the command-line tool pmset to view and change the sleep timer.

MacOSXHints points to the Developer Tools and an application called SpindownHD which sets the timer via the Mac GUI. This works successfully although the “device scan” listing doesn’t show any drives in 10.5 (for me anyway).

Using this tip from MacOSXHints I’d like to create an AppleScript to modify the hard disk sleep timer via pmset or just automating SpindownHD. More on this in a later post.

My user account debacle had another side effect. Opening a project in Final Cut Pro produced error “this project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut.”

A mild panic set in since I was running the latest version of Final Cut. Add to that none of my projects from the AutoSave Vault would open due to this error.

After some digging around I discovered what I’ll call a bug in FCP 6.02: absolute path references to files in a project. While absolute paths aren’t unusual it’s the fact they seemingly break your project when those files aren’t accessible. In my case I no longer had access to my old user account home folder but FCP was trying to access those files and couldn’t.

Instead of asking to reconnect the files (as is customary) it simply threw the nasty error. My quick fix was to chmod 770 my old home folder until I had everything moved over and renamed properly.

Apple’s FCP support group has more to add.

For reasons unknown, my Mac’s user account spiraled out of control. A few moments after login the MacBook Pro’s fan kicked in, mouse pointer became erratic then unresponsive, and the spinning beach ball stayed for good. Only way out of this deadlock was a hard reboot.

I only had a few moments to launch Activity Monitor to discover the Spotlight service (mdworker, etc) was pegging the CPU. Unfortunately, nothing related to Spotlight resolved the problem. Here’s what got me working again…

This is a summary of what I did and not meant as a step-by-step solution. You’ll need a decent grasp on the UNIX command line for success.

• Login as root (enable it via Directory Utility from an admin account).
• Open Terminal and create a tarball of the home folder to a destination volume with enough space: tar cvf [dest] [home-folder]; this is critical because you need hidden files not always copied by Finder.
• Create a new user account.
• Delete the contents of that (new) home folder.
• In System Preferences / Accounts, delete the problematic user account; don’t delete the home folder in case you need it later (the old home folder is renamed with the suffix “(Deleted)”).
• Rename your new user account to that of the old one.
• Untar the tarball: tar xvf [tarball] [home-folder].
• Rename the new home folder to that of your old one: mv [new-home] [old-home].
• Edit the new user account and verify it’s pointing to the new home folder.
• Ensure the new user account is the owner and has RW permission to the new home folder; may require chown -R [new-user] [home-folder].

Result? A new, and working, user account with the same configuration and files as the old one. This solution has the benefit of retaining the identical user and home folder name to avoid issues with configuration files.

There are probably variations to this process but this worked for me. I should note this was performed under OS X 10.5.1. Be sure to disable the root account when you’re finished.