High Sierra update distorting my AVCHD video

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Level 1

16 points

High Sierra update distorting my AVCHD video

Hello all,

I am new to FCPX as of Nov. '17, I was a user of Adobe Premier Pro with a PC but switched to Mac and FCPX because I was tired of the render times. Nevertheless, here is my issue. I record sermons with my church using an old Canon Vixia HF200 that send to a SD card format AVCHD. I am very please with FCPX because I can edit while it renders, super fast and I love it. UNTIL, I upgraded to High Sierra.

Once I upgraded I started noticing some digital distortion at the top of my frames every two or three minutes. I have been talking to a Senior Advisor with Apple and have done many shares with them concerning why all of the sudden I am getting this distortion once its imported into FCPX.

I never had this with Sierra, all my AVCHD files render fine until this update. Do I need to render my AVCHD files to ProRes first? If so what software should I use?

I am planning on getting a new 4k camera that does live stream this next month and hoping this will solve my problem because Im using a 9 year old DH video camera. But in the mean time, is anyone else having these issues and how can I avoid this.

The distortion is if you have Dish network ( which I dont anymore ) and the reception is bad and you get a digital distortion on the video.

Help

Posted on Jan 11, 2018 12:05 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

jetjaxson Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 12, 2018 1:44 PM in response to Mike Sastre

After two days of the FCP engineering department troubleshooting my issue we went another way. We partitioned my harddrive and installed High sierra and FCPX only. They were thInking all my plugins I use with ProTools might be interfering with FCPX. I formatted my SD card and recorded a few 15 second clips to see if I would get that distortion at the top after the render. Here’s the funny thing, we launched FCPX uploaded the AVCHD file dropped it in the timeline and scrubbed through the video and the file went black. We forced FCPX to close launched again and FCPX froze. Just got the spinning rainbow. They took the diagnostics of it and will send it to the programmers. All I can say Apple doesn't know if anything is wrong unless we tell them, yes time consuming but it needs to be addressed.

It is frustrating but at least they are taking the time to troubleshoot the issue. My camera is old and I am now looking at a new one that shoots Pro-res codec. They said I won’t have a problem with that format, I’m still irritated because everything worked fine with Sierra.

My iMac is a 5K, 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5, 16GB 2400 MHz DDR4 Graphics Radeon Pro 8GB

using Mac OS High Sierra Version 10.13.2 and FCPX version 10.4

This is the distortion I get when

Good

Distorted

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Answer 2

cigame2

Level 3

548 points

Jan 11, 2018 3:04 AM in response to jetjaxson

I am following discussions here since the release of 10.4 and every day there are new posts that 10.4 together with HighSierra 10.13.2 has some problems with AVCHD for some macs (maybe the ones with two graphic cards?).

And I really wonder why Apple is not redrawing 10.4 or at least gives a hint that it's not working on all machines.

That would really prevent people of spending a lot of unnessesary time and work.

For me the solution was downgrading FCP X from Time Machine to 10.3.4 on HighSierra,

or what I at least did, downgrading OS to Sierra 10.12.6 on which FCP X 10.4 is running acceptable.

Because some libraries had been converted and using 10.4 was a must.

Maybe in the future, I will update to HighSierra but only if Apple puts a new version of FCP X, or HighSierra, out on which is confirmed that it is dealing with those incompatibilities.

But speculation is not what helps here.

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Answer 3

ChJuro

Level 1

8 points

Jan 12, 2018 5:22 AM in response to cigame2

Did anyone tried whether AVCHD files are working fine if High Sierra is completely clean installed? I encoutered a problem in which AVCHD files cannot be opened by Quicktime, and furthermore clips were imported without sound in iMovie. However, I did not had this effect on a macbook pro (2016) where high sierra was clean installed. But on all other machines which were upgraded to high sierra on top of the old operating systems AVCHD didn´t work anymore. So likely there old files from former OS that are disturbing.

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Answer 4

Jan 12, 2018 6:01 AM in response to ChJuro

Doing a clean install of High Sierra seems to do the trick That's what I did and AVCHD files import fine with no problems

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