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Help with opening FCP project!
I’m learning things the hard way – but I have a PowerMac G5 with 4GB of space (two drives) and Final Cut Pro HD 5.1 One of the drives has all my capture scratch of one huge project of about 12 hours of video. I made the mistake of closing the tab of the project on FCP and opened other, smaller, projects (so it is not in the ‘open recent’ cache). When I try to open this large project in FCP it takes about 8 hours to get 12% of it and then it (and I’ve tried like 4 times) crashes FCP without opening anything.
Is there any solution to this? I know it will take a long time to open but is there anything anyone can suggest or help so that it does not keep crashing? All applications/programs are shut off (including screen/wallpaper settings). I don’t like my computer screen on 24/7 so if there is anyone who can suggest how I might be able to open my project please let me know. I am somewhat new to it so please provide details and or suggested links. Thank you for the help!
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10 Replies
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Go ahead and repair permissions on your startup drive and, using Disk Utility, try to verify the other drive. You might want to repair it but run verify first.
I hope you get other suggestions so DO NOT do this one first.
Are you comfortable opening your Macintosh? Taking all reasonable precautions and proper steps, disconnect the power from your scratch drive.
When you open the project, all the media will be offline. Save a copy of the project and then start saving it out in smaller projects as chunks or reels. You don’t want more than about 2 ours of media in any single chunk.
Shut it down and reconnect the drive.
Post back.
AGAIN: DO NOT TRY THIS UNTIL YOU’VE GOTTEN AND TRIED SOME OTHER SUGGESTIONS!
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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I did repair permissions on both drives and it seemed to move it along. Now when I open it, it takes about 2 minutes and it loads everything and just as it says “preparing video for display” FCP crashes. On the drive that holds all the media I did ‘repair permissions’ and it does so but gives me a message that “1 permission could not be repaired’. I’ve tried re-installing FCP but that doesn’t seem to help. Any suggestions? Thanks for the reply.
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do you have any older “autosaved” versions of this project?
if its a project corruption issue you may find an earlier version will open more easily… start with the most recent and work backwards (chronologically) until you find one that’ll open.
not ideal but better than nothing perhaps. -
Force your media offline (back up your project first) by unmounting your media drives. You can also try forcing chunks of media offline, instead, to narrow down the problem. Just create a temp folder on your media drive and move files into it bit by bit, trying to open your project each time. It might just be a corrupt file.
Very first, try manually deleting just your render files on each scratch disk.
HTH
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Thanks for that. I did put the media, chunk by chunk, into another drive and deleted it out of the media drive. It had no effect on trying to open it. When I open it, it still downloads all the file and at the final moment of “preparing to display video” it crashes. Is there anything I can do directly with FCP HD? I feel it might a problem related to that. Any help will be appreciated, I’m felling rather desperate at this point.
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I would try taking your media drive right offline. Drag it to the trash to unmount it (and any other media drive) and then try opening.
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I did do that, dragged the entire media drive to trash. When I then opened FCP HD it crashed at the same place “preparing video for display” (after completely loading the project). The only other drive is my boot-up drive…is it safe or do I have to do anything different with that drive to unmount it? Thanks for reply.
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You can check your boot drive to see if there are any render and/or capture files on there. If there are, just add a dash into the name of the folder (with FCP closed) and that should be enough to force them offline.
It sounds like you might be having a RAM problem, though. How much RAM do you have? Is anything else acting up?
Also, did you try trashing your FCP pref’s? And do you have another FCP workstation available which you can use to try and open the file? Any autosave files you can try?
(sorry if you already answered these questions previously)
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I did check if I had rendered files in my drive…hidden amongst ‘lost+found’ were many, but I already transfered that file along with many others to my external drive. I have 21.83 GB (out of 200GB) on my main (boot) drive. I have 25.5GB available on my media drive (also 200GB) and my external drive has 362.27GB (out of 500GB).
I trashed FCP HD preferences but it still crashes at same point on FCP HD.
I stopped keeping auto-saves a while ago because it took up a lot of room on the drive.
I did open the old FCP 4 and when I tried to open the project it says “can’t open project because there is a corrupt file” or something to that effect. I’m not sure how else to find the ‘corrupt’ file. I do notice that I have 4 sub folders (on main drive) called “previous system” could more be hidden in them? Each folder has the full list of file folders found on the main drive. I never thought a mac would make me look for a needle in a haystack (but I still love my mac).
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You could do a search for “capture” and “render” and see if there are any others, but generally they’d be located in one spot on each drive, unless you specified otherwise.
It sounds, though, like it might be the project file that’s corrupt. If that’s the case, the only way I know out of that is a backup, unfortunately.
Try this article, though, to see if there’s any help there:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/restore_corrupted_project.html
I hope that helps at all. My only other recommendation would be to try and find another FCP 5 workstation to try and open the file.
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