Fairlight - "empty" clips in timeline but play in media pool

Not sure where to begin.

Received a hard drive with a completed edit and rough sound mix for a documentary, all exported via the Media Manager with handles, to include all used media.

Opened the project and have started sorting through and organizing the material, and discovered something weird. I'm running v18.0.1 on OS X Monterey 12.5.

Some clips in the timeline, seemingly at random, are "empty", i.e. no waveform, no audio on the meters on playback, nothing. Yet the source file in media pool show and plays back audio, and the file on the hard drive does the same.

Making things even more bizarre, one specific source file is used in multiple clips and shows audio in several of the clips, but not all of them.

I've done some tests and was able to restore some of the "empty" clips with waveforms and audio, but not all of them. What I did was to put the playhead over an “empty” clip. Right click on Find in Media Pool. Right click on the file in the Media Pool and selected “Replace selected Clip’, then navigated to the exact same file on the hard drive and hit enter. Voila the waveform appeared in the clip!!

I repeated this for a few more clips, it worked for about 3 before it stopped working. It worked on a few more later and seems to be random.

All files are .Mov, stereo PCM audio 48kHz, 24fps.The video codec is Apple ProRes 422, although I'm only concerned with the audio, the picture is locked and I have a low res reference for sync.

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Summary:
A. Some clips appear to have no content, even though the source in the media pool viewer shows audio and plays it back, and some source files show up correctly in one clip, but “empty" in another right beside it in the same timeline. All of the source files play back correctly in the Finder.

B. Copying an “empty” clip to a new Timeline results in an empty clip, no waveform or sound output. I.e. whatever is wrong with that clip in the timeline gets copied over to the new timeline.

C. Dragging the *source file* from the Media pool (or Finder) into a new Timeline results in a normal clip with waveform and sound output. Contrast with B. above.

D. On some of the “empty” clips, right clicking to identify the file in the media pool and then right clicking this file to “replace” it, but selecting the exact same file on the drive results in the waveform appearing in the clip and everything functioning normally. Doesn’t work for all of them, unfortunately.

E. Duplicating a source file in the finder with a new name, and “replacing” the clip in the media pool with the duplicate doesn’t change the clip behavior, if empty, it stays empty.

Does anyone know what's going on and how I can fix this?

Thanks!

Could be related to: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=165712

I don't think so, but will have to go back to the original drive that was delivered and open the original again to see. Pretty sure I noticed that even in the 5.1 original that I started working from that there was missing audio in a number of clips.

Update - just checked the original project & timeline as delivered - same clips are missing audio in 5.1. So it`s either the timeline, or a problem relinking media, or connecting the media pool files to the timeline clips. Something in there is not working correctly.

I think this is something different.

I was commenting more as a note to the devs that fixing the one might also lead to fixing the other. I’m not sure the polywav files are necessary to cause the behavior in the other report.


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