Hi everyone,
As some of you know, there have a been a number of threads/projects on here suffering from footage turning into solid green images during import (whether through FCP's L&T, REDCINE-X and even Clipfinder). Like others, we were experiencing the same issue on our project, inexplicably, and have managed to isolate the problem and come up with a potential (albeit laborious) workaround for those still looking for a solution (considering there are none out there yet).
We've managed to isolate the problem to a select number of clips and it appears that the cause is a dropped frame, actually, several corrupted, dropped frames, that appear as solid green images in the middle of the clip. We were shooting on several SD cards and it appears there wasn't any one card that was the culprit. However, after speaking with our DIT, we learned that on any card that had a "corrupted" frame, when copying to the hard drives, he would encounter a "Source Verify After Copy Error." Having never seen this before (and us being in the middle of the desert with no internet access), and having verified that the information/footage was there in RED ALERT, he made a note of it, labeled the folder and moved on.
(I should note that while he should have possibly recopied, we were so under the gun and so behind on copying that, having checked to make sure all the footage did get copied and played fine in REDALERT, there was no way for him to know.)
When he came in this evening and started going through it, he discovered that all of the problem files with the green frames were from the same file that gave him the "Source Verify After Copy Error." We were able to isolate those files based off those file labels and those notes and all of the other non-issue files appear to be importing through L&T correctly. However, I'll have an update tomorrow on whether this is entirely true. So far so good.
So, that seems to be the problem, though we still don't know what caused the weird dropped frames.
Now, for the workaround on the damaged clips:
First and foremost, as suggested above, not ALL of your clips are corrupted. What happens when converting through L&T is that once the program hits the bad frame (the green one) it doesn't know what to do and converts everything after that frame, whether in the same clip or all the clips following it, to green.
Regarding the clips with the green frames, what we've done is brought the corrupted clip into Clipfinder and set in and out points before and after the corrupted section, effectively creating two separate clips, with the section within it missing and then exported it as normal.
Sometimes this doesn't matter because the corrupted file is in the beginning, before the marker. Sometimes, however, they're in the middle and we have to manually go in and re-sync the audio.
The reason you can't just say "oh, well, we cut out 10 frames, so just drop the second clip in 10 frames later," is that, at least for us, scrubbing over the corrupted section causes Clipfinder to crash. Our AE is going to be finessing those corrupted clips and we'll let you know what his work flow is.
The fortunate thing is that we're only losing a few frames of footage in certain clips. Fortunately, we were shooting with two cameras and have multiple takes of each scene. The bad news is that we don't know what caused the dropped frames, since the issue wasn't with one card in particular. Could have been a cable issus, card reader issue, random drive issue, we don't know.
But at least there's more of a solution to the problem then there was before.
Let me me know if you have any questions.
Josh
