Compound Clips with deactivated audio creating "ghost clips"

Glad to hear you might have found the issue! That is useful to know so we can try and reproduce it. Well hopefully you can update to the new build of X2Pro when its out!

Awesome! Unfortunately I work in a corporate setting where software updates are laborious and infrequent, so it may be a while till i get to try it out, but I'm (eventually) looking forward to the update!

In the meantime, I think I may have actually found the cause of the original "ghost clips" issue that I had created this thread for, but it generally involves compound clips, nested inside compound clips, nested inside more compound clips until you have Inception. And we've basically told our editors to stop doing that because it's ridiculous.

We believe we have now fixed this and there should be a new version available on the Appstore in a day or two.

Thank you for your help fixing this issue.

Oh good! I'm glad that creating a clean test project helped. Thank you for looking into this!

Apologies for the slow response.

We have identified what the problem is and we are now working on a fix to solve this. The developer said he found the issue quickly as it is the tidiest and simplest xml he has ever looked at!

I will hopefully have a fix for you soon.

Hey Daniel,

So I've attached all the related materials for a turnover test that we did. I can't seem to replicate the "ghost clips" problems, but this test shows a couple instances of compound clips acting strangely. Next time we see a ghost clip, i'll try to isolate it and send that to this forum.

In the meantime, I made an FCPX timeline with several iterations of the same compound clip. Each are unique compound clips with the same media (so they wouldn't affect each other if I made changes inside them.)

The compound clips contain 4 stereo tracks. 2 DX tracks, an FX track, and an MX track.

In the Protools session, each stereo track seems to have come in as a mono pair.

Compound Clip 1 - audio inside compound clip is active and audio on compound clip is active
This one is normal. All audio tracks inside the compound clip are included in the AAF

Compound Clip 2 - audio inside compound clip is active and audio on compound clip has been deselected in the inspector
This one is normal. As intended, none of the audio tracks come through.

Compound Clip 3 - audio inside compound clip has been disabled (v keystroke) and audio on compound clip is active
This one is normal. As intended, none of the audio tracks come through.

Compound Clip 4 - audio inside compound clip has been disabled (v keystroke) and audio on compound clip has also been deselected in the inspector
This one is normal. As intended, none of the audio tracks come through.

Compound Clip 5 - audio from compound clip has been detached (ctrl shift S) and FX and MX roles have been disabled on the detached audio in the inspector.
This one is definitely screwy. The intention here would be for only the DX tracks (both of them) to make it into the AAF. What seems to have happened, I'm guessing, is that both of the DX tracks from the detached audio (as intended), and all 4 stereo tracks from video portion of the compound clip (which theoretically has no more audio since it was detached, so definitely not intended) were included in the AAF. BTW, sorry I made things confusing with the 2 DX tracks. I brain farted a didn't realize until I was too far in that having 2 sets of Stereo DX tracks for this test was unnecessary and possibly confusing.

Compound Clip 6 - audio from compound clip has been detached from compound clip (ctrl shift S) and deleted completely.
This one is screwy too. Ideally no audio should have made it into the AAF since it was detached and deleted from the compound clip. Instead ALL of the audio tracks have now been added into the AAF.

Compound Clip 7 - audio inside compound clip is active and DX and FX tracks on compound clip have been disabled in inspector, leaving only MX
This one seems to be working as intended. The intention is for only the MX track be included in the AAF, and that seems to be what happened.


group clip test - here as a control


normal audio clip - here as a control

Hopefully I described these clearly. Feel free to ask for more specifics and clarification

So from what I'm seeing, there seems to be some weirdness with how X2pro handles audio that has been detached from a compound clip - or more specifically, with the remaining video portion of the compound clip. Those clips are intended to be picture only, but once you detach the audio, X2pro defaults to doing the opposite of intended (including all the unwanted audio.)

Hey Daniel,

Sorry for the delayed reply - I've sent a test aaf to our sound guy and will hopefully have something for you soon. Wanted to send you a clean, organized simplified timeline (xml) instead of one from an actual project.

Would you be able to send us your xml file so we can try and see why it is creating these ghost clips?

Daniel Beasley wrote: In the X2Pro Preferences (cmd + ,) you can choose to discard disabled clips and inactive clips. Does this remove them from the AAF?

Yes both of those options have always been selected, but the problem persists for us

In the X2Pro Preferences (cmd + ,) you can choose to discard disabled clips and inactive clips. Does this remove them from the AAF?

Hey all,

So we're experiencing a bug with compound clips where a compound clip with audio seems to convert to AAF just fine, but if we use a compound clip where the audio has been deactivated (unchecked in the audio properties panel), the AAF generated by X2Pro creates "ghost clips" of the audio that would have been included, had the audio been active.

These clips don't seem to contain any actual audio, but they're irritating and can clutter up the sound mixer's timeline, and it eats into him time having to remove them.

Anyone else experienced this?

We are using FCPX 10.4.6, exporting audio XMLs version 1.8, and converting with X2Pro version 4.2.2

[Screenshot example attached]