Clip Media Issue (canvas telling lies)

Question

I posted about this a few days ago, but now I've discovered a few more things that may help somebody diagnose this. If I had to summarize my problem, I would say that the canvas is telling me lies about the sequence. Dirty dirty lies. It’s really difficult to explain exactly what my problem is, so bear with me while I go on and on and on.
Essentially, I’ve got two different cuts of my movie. There’s the one that I see in the canvas (“canvas picture”) and the one that the sequence says SHOULD be happening (“sequence picture”). When I use the playhead and the canvas, I get the canvas picture, which is what I have cut according to since it took me a while to realize this problem. When I just play my entire sequence without exporting it, I see my brilliantly edited canvas picture. When I do a number of things, I get the sequence picture. If I take a still frame from the sequence, it is from the sequence picture and not the canvas picture. When I expand my video tracks to reveal the thumbnail pictures, they are from the sequence picture. When I apply a transition, the handles or area under the transition is from the sequence picture then snaps back to the canvas picture as soon as the dissolve is over. Most importantly, when I export I end up with the sequence picture, which is very different from the canvas picture I so lovingly put together.
I had to import using capture now. (I know, I know, but I was in a time crunch and the horrible little dv camera I was using made FCP pitch a fit when I tried to log and capture) So basically after I imported I had RAW 1 and RAW 2. It separated itself because there was an intentional blank space on the tape. I didn’t touch the camera while I was importing. Why on earth do you need to know this? Well, RAW 2 isn’t experiencing this whole canvas/sequence disconnect. When I export my cut, the clips from RAW 2 are exactly what I cut them to be in the canvas picture.
RAW 1 is possessed, and unfortunately is also about 80% of my footage. I made a test sequence to show exactly how screwed up it is, and it’s much worse than I thought. I put the entirety of RAW 1 in a brand new sequence. I cut it at every minute mark, or as close to it as possible. (I guess since this is DV it isn’t exactly 30 frames/sec so the sequence recognizes that and it’s missing frames around the minute mark.) Anyway, I split RAW 1 at every minute but didn’t move the clips. I took a still frame from the beginning of each of these clips. I then painstakingly aligned the end of the still frame with the canvas picture frame that it corresponds to. Make sense? I’m going to attempt one of those dot and dash diagrams to show you.
V2 ---------|sss|-------------------------------------
V1 |------------|(C)|--------x|C|---------------------|
Okay. So C on v1 is the first canvas picture frame after the arbitrary split denoted by x. sss is the still frame taken at this point which is taken from the sequence picture. In a normal universe sss would be the same frame as C, but with my luck sss is actually the same as (C), a frame from earlier in the clip.
Make sense now? I hope so, because it gets weirder.
As I did this at every minute mark in RAW 1, (C) got further and further away from C. So at 01:00:00;00 C and (C) are the same.
If C is at 01:01:01;00, (C) is at 01:01:00;12 so it’s 18 frames off.
If C is at 01:14:00;00, (C) is at 01:13:51;21 so it’s 8 seconds 9 frames off.
If I was good at math I could probably write a math equation describing how proportionally off the sequence picture is from the canvas picture.
Once again, this is not an issue with RAW 2. I did the same test with RAW 2 and the still frames aligned with the cuts. RAW 1 and RAW 2 were imported at the same time from the same tape and the same camera. Neither of them have been offline since I imported and I have never had to reconnect them.
In short, WHAT IS THIS???? HOW DO I FIX IT????? WHY ME????? (Please excuse the yelling. I’m a little frustrated.)

Answer 1

Hooboy! Sounds like you got a mess.
If you select the clip and hit Command 9 does the info tell you anything weird?
framerate and codec are what they're supposed to be?
Does the clip have to render in the timeline?
If it's in dropframe then you won't have frame 00 and frame 01 on each minute except for every tenth minute - but it shouldn't be off by that much.
I agree it sounds to me like something happened when you captured the clip.
Something you might try is to take several minutes of your clip and export it as a custom quicktime with all the settings set as if you captured it (720x480 - dv ntsc codec - 29.97 frame rate)
Then reimport that clip and see if it behaves any differently.