A strange "beep" sound that I didn't add.....a mystery.

Question

A strange "beep" sound that I didn't add.....a mystery.

Ok. Who's ready for a mystery?

WHile editing a project, I encountered a strange "beep" sound in my project. The beep is in a music clip in the timeline, and the beep happens at exactly the moment the play head goes into a title created in FC.

I double clicked on the audio clip to see if it happens when it is in the viewer, and it did. If I bring up (double click) the original from the browser and play the section that this was happening in, there is no beep.

My solution was to replace the audio clip in the timeline with a new one from the browser and all is fine again.

So my question is how did I get the beep in the first place? The beep only lasted a few frames.

Did I push some button somewhere?

Jonathan

PM G5 1.8, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Feb 6, 2010 3:58 PM

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Answer 1

Nick Holmes

Level 7

30,018 points

Feb 6, 2010 4:10 PM in response to Jonathan Levin2

The beep is generated by Final Cut Pro and means that your audio needs to be rendered at that point.

This could be because:
• You are using an audio file that is in some other format than 16 Bit, 48 kHz AIFF.
• A fade transition was applied to an audio track that was previously rendered (see bullet point above).
• There are more audio tracks than your system can handle in real time.
• A combination of two or more of the above.
• A really small duck has got itself trapped behind your monitor.

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Answer 2

Feb 7, 2010 12:32 AM in response to Nick Holmes

Hi

May be totally out on thin ice. But in the early days of iMovie

Random beeps occured when there was drop-outs in audio from tape miniDV

These beeps usually only occured in one channel and was very short - still annoying.

Cleaning tape in Camera did help this and in iMovie there was a filter to set on/off.

Yours iMovie archeologist Bengt W (early days of 1999)

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Answer 3

Feb 7, 2010 8:39 AM in response to Jonathan Levin2

Thanks Bengt.

Nick,

The music was created in Garageband using some of their loops. I then exported the file as AIFF and imported that into my FC project.

What's interesting is I bought some music from TripleScoop, converted their WAV files to AIFF in Itunes, imported that into FC. The Triplescoop music has no render line the audio clip in FC, but my Garageband music that I imported has a blue line at the top of it's audio clip, which I assume is pretty much rendered.

My project has a total of 6 audio tracks. and there are no transitions either audio or video.

At this point I have to go with the idea of a duck behind my monitor.

Jonathan

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Answer 4

Studio X

Level 7

27,229 points

Feb 7, 2010 8:57 AM in response to Jonathan Levin2

There are moments when the audio can not be processed in real time and FCP will beep to let you know you need to do something about it. What you can do to prevent this is to reserve more RAM for the audio portion of the processing. You do this by going into USER PREFERENCES>GENERAL and increase the number of Real time audio tracks. Otherwise, you do an AUDIO MIXDOWN to preprocess the audio into the stereo pair output.

To prevent the beeping under real time playback, you generally need to specify in the preferences a few more tracks than what you have used in the timeline. You need more than just the number of tracks used in the timeline as transitions are also considered tracks.

You don't want to add more than you'll generally need as this takes away RAM that can be used for other video processing purposes. The default of 8 is a good compromise for most uses.

x

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Answer 5

Feb 7, 2010 2:05 PM in response to Jonathan Levin2

Hi X,

Good info.

I think I set my audio preferences to have four tracks of audio, and had no idea how this would affect the above. At the end of an edit session I usually delete unused audio/video tracks, because sometimes I "park" things in a track before moving them in a more final position.

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