Can’t Open FCP Project (still)

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Jason McCaffrey] “Reconnecting bin by bin is a very tedious process and it feels a little silly worrying about reconnecting media that I haven’t used/looked at/thought about since February.

I guess the real question is- Am I barking up the wrong tree going through this reconnecting media business? Is there something else I should be doing?”

Here’s a question (to answer your question with): how many hours of footage are there total, and how many hours have you spent so far in looking for the corrupted files? At a certain point, those 2 numbers may become equal, or worse still, you spend more time looking for the file than you took to capture in the 1st place.

In that case, you may have been better off if you had just assumed that all the media was corrupt, & you could have saved time by recapturing all of the media, or at least the media you were actually using in your working cut.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Jason Mccaffrey]

That’s a great point, but I’m still curious if it’s likely that a clip became corrupt when it hasn’t been touched in months. I don’t understand why I had no problem with the project on Friday, but then when I come back on Tuesday the project won’t open. Could I have prevented this somehow?

Jason

400 MHz Power Mac G4 2.9
832 MB SDRAM
(256 256 256 64=832-everyone asks)
FCP 4.5
QuickTime 6.5.2

[John Burgan]

You don’t need to go through every bin chronologically: follow this method.

Take half of your stuff offline (alphabetically, whatever seems logical) and see if you can load up; if not, exit FCP and take the stuff that was offline online, and the material that was online off again (in other words swap). You will then see which half of the material is causing the problem. Repeat, always dividing the material 50/50 to narrow down where the problem is.

Of course this works quickest when there is only one or a few corrupt clips, but at any rate it’s quicker than going through each bin separately.

[Jason Mccaffrey]

When I got back from lunch I decided to try to open the corrupt project that was giving me all the troubles yesterday. I turned on the original hard drive so fcp could access all of the original media. Today the project loaded, even though yesterday I got an “I/O error” message while trying to perform the same operation.

So I proceeded to immediately break this gigantic project down into smaller, more manageable project files.

I appreciate all of the advice, though, and am still curious about why this might have happened at all and what an editor can do to avoid this hassle in the future.

Jason

400 MHz Power Mac G4 2.9
832 MB SDRAM
(256 256 256 64=832-everyone asks)
FCP 4.5
QuickTime 6.5.2

[Don Greening]

Jason,

Sometimes the directories on hard drives become somewhat corrupted because of all the writings and deletions of files that happen over time. It’s a good idea to have the program DiskWarrior and run it as preventive maintenance before problems start rearing their ugly little heads. DiskWarrior will build completely new directories instead of trying to fix the old ones like lesser programs do.

So when FCP tells you it can’t connect to certain media files, more often than not it’s the directory “pointer” that’s become corrupted and not the actual media.

Hope this has helped to answer your last question.

– Don