FCP 6 Project File Doesn’t Open On Any Final Cut

[Shane Ross]

Sounds like a corrupt project. If I were you, I’d open and use the latest autosave you have that will open. Yeah, you lost some work, but the project still opens.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Loic De lame]

Yeah, figured it’d probably come down to that. Just wanted to see if anyone has any solutions or tricks to get anything back at all.

Ashame that FCP doesn’t backup or store projects like Avid. Waiting for the day of Avid Cut…

[Shane Ross]

[Loic de Lame] “Ashame that FCP doesn’t backup or store projects like Avid.”

It does. That is what the AUTOSAVE VAULT is. A backup of the entire project.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Loic De lame]

I know the autosave vault stores the full projects at whatever time interval you want.

What I meant was that Avid’s Attic, in a way, is better because it stores each of your bins separately. So if one of them becomes corrupt, your entire project isn’t messed up.

If I find anything else out about a remedy to this issue, I’ll post back. Thanks for the responses (and future ones to come, hopefully if any!)

[Loic De lame]

Hello again.

Posting back to give an update as to what happened.

I wasn’t able to find any solutions to this problem of corrupt projects. It seems that the only thing to do if this happens to you is to redo the work from whatever is the most recent autosave project you can open.

It is interesting to note that there isn’t a definitive file-size that will cause a corruption. Another editor I know called me after seeing this post and said his file was 300MB+! Mine was a measly 80MB! Looking around online, you’ll find many different responses to this question, ranging from 30MB to 400MB.

But in the end, it all comes down to having a workflow to setup a fallback position to prevent your precious project of endless amounts of scrutinizing work to be swept away down the tubes by a tiny 1 or 0. (Ok, it may be more complicated than that, but I’m not discussing that issue. ;~))

So, the million dollar question is do you use autosave, have a project backup workflow and have a disk backup procedure? You do, don’t you? ;~)

The Answer
Unfortunately, there is no solution to a corrupt FCP project.
But there is a workflow that you can use to help insulate you from this incident. And I highly recommend it for various reasons! Including saving your skin. ;~)

The Workflow Quick Answer

A quick rundown for those looking just for an answer.

1.) Create XML backups of the sequence(s) you work on during the day. At minimum, at the end of the day/time you work on it. But ideally before you start and during editing.

2.) Create an XML backup of the entire project at the end of the day.

3.) Copy the FCP project file, add the date (and time if you so desire) and place in an archive folder. I prefer the format YYYY-MM-DD TTTT. But whatever you like, cause it’s your project!

4.) Delete older and unused sequences if you version your sequences in your FCP project or somehow end up with a ton of them They add a bunch of file-size. You have them in backups anyway. Plus, you’ve moved on with your edit.

5.) Backup your entire project to another disk. And even a third if you can. Redundancy is your friend!

The More Detailed/Rambling Answer

As for preventative measures for this (in FCP at least), I’ve come up with the a workflow that I’ll quickly describe here, but will post in more detail in the coming week.

It essentially consists of creating an XML of the sequence I’m working on as soon as I open it. Then, periodically, when it hits me, to do an XML export of that sequence while I’m editing. While it may seem like overkill, there are two reasons for this.

1) You can never be too safe. And 2) the one question I have is if your project becomes corrupt while you’re using it, yet it works throughout the day with no problems (which was the case with mine), does the corruption translate into the XML?

Back to the workflow, the most important time to do an XML export is when you’re done editing that sequence that day/time/forever/etc. If anything, do that do save yourself when hell breaks loose. Hopefully it doesn’t, but that’s another story. :~)

At the end of each day, I also do an export of the entire project in XML as the last ditch resort.

To run along side this, I have autosave running every 10 minutes. I personally don’t like going over 15, but whatever floats your boat. In addition, at the end of the day, I copy the project file and then put it in an archive folder.

As one more note, and just so it’s there, I date all the files I use along with aversion numbers or times in 24hr military time.

E.G.
FCP Project and Main Timeline sequence will be named as follows.
Copy of the project to put into archive folder: FCP Project YYYY-MM-DD
XML of sequences: Main Timeline YYYY-MM-DD TTTT
XML of project: FCP Project YYYY-MM-DD

Lastly, and most importantly, is to have a backup running of the entire monstrous project and everything associated with it. If it’s digital, then it doesn’t exist unless there are two copies.

For that, I highly recommend SuperDuper!. Easy to use and is capable of disk imaging so you can store multiple disks on one backup disk if you’d like.

Also, keep in mind that a backup copy of everything won’t save you if you have a corrupt project. Even the autosave doesn’t help you in either Avid or FCP.

The difference between the systems is Avid autosaves each bin separately, so a corrupt bin doesn’t necessarily take your whole project down. FCP, the entire project is what it autosaves. So everything goes with it.

One more note (because you can never have enough), clean your FCP project once in a while. Maybe at the end of the week, month, whatever you’d like. So delete old sequences you don’t need because they’re earlier edits or whatever. Sequences are what add to your file-size the most, especially if you have versioned sequences.

Clips and the like, I would leave alone, unless there are duplicates or you don’t need them anymore, etc. Don’t forget about the Make Offline… function in FCP to help in removing files from a project. No harm in not using it, but makes it easier to track and manage your files.

Some other reasons this workflow is nice is because you can easily recover a sequence from the XMLs if that sequence was accidentally changed and you can’t recover because you don’t have enough undos (which you can set to 99 in User Preferences I believe). Or whatever other reasons there are for that happening. You can also import the XMLs in different versions of FCP, from major versions since 4.5 I believe to point versions in FCP6. Note: If you’re planning on migrating a project to an older version, be sure to test what XML version it can support.

Anyway, I hope this helps others out there in some fashion. Hopefully not too late either. I’ll be posting again soon with more a more precise and visual workflow! :~)

Loic