CORRUPT Project File – please for the love of…

[Devin Crane]

Don’t know what the deal is but we are having the same issue. Not a whole lot of confidence right now in FCPX, at least in FCP7 you could open an auto save file if something went wrong.

[Herb Sevush]

Autosave files are so yesterday. FCPX is like a hockey puck, your supposed to skate to where it’s going to be, so maybe you can open up a file and wait for it to become the right one.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/22383

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Jason Jenkins]

An Uninterruptible Power Supply is always a good investment.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

Check out my Mormon.org profile.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Giles,

This forum is a bit hot right now – I’d try posting on the Apple Support Forums or even here in the FCP X Technique forums.

The only suggestion I have is to see if you have a project you can recover from time machine back-ups.

Franz.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Giles Kesteloot] “I locate it on Finder and try to open but says file is “corrupt, truncated or wrong format””

Where was it?

[Bill Davis]

Takes me back.

PRECISELY the same thing happened to me back on FCP-1.0 about six months after it’s release.

Unlike today, however, the neighborhood wasn’t over-populated with jerks who were more interested in gleefully pointing out how superior their world view is – and more with people (Like Jeremy here) actually reached out to help me survive.

Actually, back then, the late, great Ralph Fairweather used to slip onto the boards (usually in the middle of the night) to shepherd many of us through the shakeout of FCP in it’s early days.

Got to shake his hand one year at NAB and it stands among my fondest memories of that era.

I miss guys like Ralph. They made a huge difference in helping many of us turn into the early successful FCP editors of the turn of the last century – and they certainly bred an atmosphere where HELP was considered WAY more valuable than SNARK.

Oh, and don’t give up hope, Giles. If you have meta-data files you can see. It’s possible that you can re-build some or all of your EDL from them.

Even if not, take seriously the Time Machine backup concept. I learned after crashes just like yours that even solid software (and FCP-V1 was remarkably stable – can become less so after software updates and features are added. So the more “crash proof” a workflow you can adopt – the better you’ll fare in the long run.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “Unlike today, however, the neighborhood wasn’t over-populated with jerks who were more interested in gleefully pointing out how superior their world view is”

Point well taken, but as one of the jerks I will point out that

1 – I wasn’t responding to Giles and his problem, but rather to Devin’s sympathetic reply

and

2 – All you did was tell Giles how to avoid the problem next time, which is exactly what Jason did, although yours was in a less snarky tone,

because

3 – This wonderful software you so espouse, epitome of Apple’s software brilliance, has just royally screwed him and apparently there’s nothing to be done about it.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Giles Kesteloot]

>>>If you have meta-data files you can see. It’s possible that you can re-build some or all of your EDL from them.

again sorry for being an FCP novice but i’m just getting started with video – but from what i can see i have all my files. like 20 GBs in that specific project folder.

i just can’t open the project one. is there really hope or do i just start over?

also, regarding the Backup Vault someone mentioned as a preventative option, can someone please walk me through a typical use case on how you would back stuff up so it’s current enough but doesnt risk getting corrupted?

do u just save iterations over and over as new projects?

any advice is welcome – cheers
giles

[Oliver Peters]

Any possibility that an earlier version might still exist in a Time Machine back-up?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Bill Davis]

giles.

All macs come with Time Machine.

You specify a hard drive, and a time between backups – and the system records a “picture” of your system at whatever interval you choose. It’s pretty efficient, since it really only records the changes once the system is initially imaged.

Calling up Time Machine after a problem, lets you virtually “walk back” in time to recover the data state of all your programs and documents as they evolve over time. So you’re never more than a few clicks from where you were at the last auto-backup.

It’s build into the Mac OS.

Unless you absolutely can’t afford a dedicated backup drive to hang on your system (and at today’s prices, that’s pretty rare) it’s the simplest and surest hedge against data corruption you can find.

Hopefully, someone who knows a lot about the FCP-X XML structure then I do can help you recover the data about your edit prior to the crash. (I personally have never had to do that (knock wood) since FCP-X rev 1 was released.

Try the Apple FCP-X forums on the official Apple site. There may be someone there who can help. Or even try your local Apple Store. If the data is important. The more avenues you explore, the better your chances will likely be.

Again, good luck.

And let us know how things turn out.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor