How to get arond this “General Error”

[David Gaona]

How do you get rid of the motion arrows? Where do we find them.

[Suzan Beraza]

I am having the exact same “General Error” problem and am trying desperately to finish a film. What do you mean by motion arrows? If it is easier to explain by phone, please call me at 970-728-6639. I’m a bit overwhelmed by this problem.

Best,
Suzan

[Anders Moden]

I think I have part of the solution that I found on another forum. I guess “general error” can encompass multiple problems.

Even though I have a separate hard drive set up for FCP, FCP insists on creating a Final Cut Pro Documents folder in documents folder on my internal hard drive. So it gets confused when there’s two FCPDocuments folders. Nothing in the system settings in FCP points to that location, still it creates a new folder every time it starts up.

I cannot make freeze frames, no markers gets exported with a qt-movie, if I export direct to compressor the markers appear.

The general error warning also appears directly after starting up FCP.

[Drew Lahat]

In my case it was a bad clip (relinked to mismatching media). The most useful thing was doing renders, and halving the range each time until I zeroed out on the culprit.

[Kesten Migdal]

Thank you! I was having the same issue. The problem was a .PSD file I had swapped out with the same name. For some reason it didn’t like that. Usually I update the file and that works fine. This time I deleted the .PSD file, then created a new one with the same name. I had to manually go in and add the Photoshop back to the two places I had it placed in my timeline.

[Josh Hayes]

This is a good point. General Error is just that a general error. However I can tell you what worked for me in my case. I pasted below my response from Creative Cow forum.

“I’m sure there’s different reasons for some people, but I figured out what was causing it on my end. The common factor most of us have is that these are new drives. And with new drives comes a bunch of new cables. I pulled the new firewire cable I was using (that had just come with my drive) and switched it with a firewire 800 cable I know worked, and wholla. Problem instantly solved!

Why does is always have to happen on a deadline?
“

[Wale Adewumi]

Thank you so much for your help i have been on this video for the past 3 days but now it’s rendering. thanks men.

[Georgios Stylianopoulos]

Hello,

I know this comes rather late but someone can use it…
I tried several staff but the following worked, don’t know if it works for you but give it a try:
My case: I had exported a file, did some changes and tried to export it once more Bang! General error.
Solution: restarted Mac (I know its an old PC habit and I’m 99% sure it didn’t have anything to do
with the solution, but I have to mention EXACTLY what I did) and then deleted the original file.
Tried to export it with different setting, export worked fine.
Deleted the file once more. Tried to export it with the wanted settings and bingo! No general error.

Hope this helps someone…

George

[Daniel Korb]

I FOUND A SOLUTION! hit render then touch your desktop, so FCP is in the back ground. That’s it. I had Activity Monitor on and noticed when I left FCP it’s ram usage dropped from 250-400mb. Now I can render things that would never render before or I had to render 1 frame at a time. I just rendered something that would have taken me all day in about 20 minutes!

[Richard Jochum]

I had general error (34) issues too and after reading this post I decided to look for problems on my end. My solution: Make sure that you clear unintentional Mark-in or Mark-out points. That did it for me.