No audio when importing AVI files into FCP

Mick_M wrote:

Curiously, after running that Terminal command my Services menu item disappeared and it looks like the old contents are now just listed at the bottom.

That's exactly what the Terminal command is supposed to do. If you ran it just as I posted, the effect is that there is no gathering in a submenu for less than 10 items; you have 7, so that is what is expected. When the threshold was 5, so 7 items were put in a submenu, now they are just put in directly in the menu.

I forgot one obvious alternative: you can convert the files directly from Quicktime Player:

File->Export As

and then either choose Audio (to match with video in FCP) or 480p, which will export the file in H264 with audio at the original frame size of 640x480.

Mick_M wrote:

I'm guessing "Encode Selected Video File" is a capability you've added to the Services menu - I don't see that (in Sonoma, anyway)

It is always there, provided that you have selected one or more video files.

Depending on how many "Services" there are, it may not be directly in the contextual menu, but in the Services sub-menu:

I got it. The link appears in email notifications.

If you don't have a lot of these there is a workaround to the problem. In the Finder right-click on the file and select Encode Selected Video File. Use the Audio only function. That will generate an audio track that will work in FCP. You can combine the two into a sync clip. Not the simplest workaround, but it saves recompressing the video.

Whether there is a Services sub-menu or not depends on two things:

a) the number of these services

b) a threshold that is set by some obscure command that I can't recall (probably defaults something)

So if you have more than, say, 10 of them, they might get grouped under a sub-menu, but if you have fewer, they'd appear directly in the menu.

It appears that the default threshold is five services.

It can be changed, as I suspected, with a Terminal command, e.g.

defaults write -g NSServicesMinimumItemCountForContextSubmenu -int 10

makes it so you need 10 services to force the existence of a submenu.

What is the rest of the menu? Your screenshot is cropped just after “Copy” but there are other items below that.

EDIT: please disregard; the image was cropped on my iPhone but I can see it now on the Mac

Can you tell which of the two is the original? I can't.

One is a frame from your file, and the other is from the H264 version.

In my Sonoma I don't see Services any longer but I do see Encoding

Would it be possible to share a clip using Dropbox or WeTransfer? The link will appear in notifications.

What OS and FCP version are you using?