In need of assistance. My nearly completed feature film won’t load in FCPX!!!

[Bill Davis]

LOTS of possibilities here.

First and foremost, whatever media has the file that won’t launch, I’d get a bit for bit file cloner and make a backup of it before you write ANYTHING else to that drive. If the issue is a bad file header or an “end of file” marker – then you’re at risk of something you do writing over the bad sectors. So that would be my step one if you haven’t been backing up your project regularly.

Next, look in your Movies folder and see if the Clips, Project backups and/or other files are intact there.

If so and you’ve got an earlier backup try to launch that. If it works, DUPLICATE that project to a fresh drive ASAP.

The success or failure is going to be whether it’s corrupt storage media or just a corrupt file structure in that project. Remember X does all it’s work as metadata, so the actual “state” of your edit is just small text files that are auto-saved constantly. So chances are that it maybe wrote your latest changes to a part of the drive that’s gone bad and launching an earlier version will get nearly all your work back.

Let us know how it goes.

Oh, and if it proves to be a drive going bad. Clone that whole drive and retire it. Once they start going bad they tend to fail totally in short order, IME.

Good Luck.

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[Marcus Hardy]

Thanks for your response. I’ve run diagnostics on the hard drive in question numerous times, and its always reported clean and good. So I don’t think its a hardware problem. I have numerous back ups of the event and media, I’ve tried the FCPX created ‘backup’ and it still hangs on loading, and I’ve tried opening one of my own created backups, one even as far back as october, still won’t load it. I’m not sure what to make of it, I have dozens of other events on this hard drive, and they all load lightning fast, its literally this singular event that causes the problem.

Is there any way I can ‘trick’ FCPX into relinking my project to a separate event? So I can avoid having to deal with this headache all together?

[Charlie Austin]

[Marcus Hardy] “its literally this singular event that causes the problem.”

FWIW, Quit FCP… wait a minute or so, note the time, and then try and open your problem event. After it hangs/crashes/whatever, open the Console app, select “all messages” in the upper left, and type Final Cut Pro into the search field. what is it saying has occurred at the time it just blew up?

————————————————————-

~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Don Smith]

Just checking the obvious here… is it possible that you’re seeing red because you’ve recently changed the preferences to use Proxy media? If you’re lucky enough for this to be the problem just change the preferences back to use original media.

NewsVideo.com

[Loren Risker]

I second checking the console app.

Here’s something else you can try. Create a new event and dump all the missing media into it. From the project browser, select your project and view the inspector. Under the properties tab, click the modify event references button. It should see your new event, drag that to the top. That should at least bring all of your media back online.

To attempt to repair the event, first make a backup copy of your CurrentVersion.fcpevent and stick it somewhere safe. Then move/delete your render files, analysis files, proxy files, everything but the original media out of your event folder.

Clear all of your events and projects out of your Final Cut Projects and Events folders so only that event will show up when you launch FCPX. Open up FCPX. If your event shows, then all is not lost and you should be able to recovery cleanly from there.

Then go to to the FCPX feature request page and tell apple to give us our auto save fault back dammit.

————-
OutOfFocus.TV – Original series, music videos, and entertainment for your couch.

[T. Payton]

Marcus,

I’ve been in your shoes, almost exactly. I had a student feature I was helping with across about 8 events. I had the exact same thing happen. I did get it figured out, so hang in there.

I’ve tried opening one of my own created backups, one even as far back as october, still won’t load it.

This would lead me to believe that something is up with your system, and not the event DB files. Could be your OS itself, but more likely third party plugins? Not just the motion stuff in “Motion Templates” but FXPlug or even third party audio plugins?

Is there anything in /library/plug-ins folder?
Also look in /library/application support/final cut pro/templates/effects

Also tell me about that event. What is in it? Straight footage, or are you storing compound clips in there too? How big is the CurrentVersion.fcpevent file?

My first step in troubleshooting would be to create a new user account, login to it and see if the problem persists. If that didn’t work try on another machine. If you don’t have another Mac, create a new partition with a fresh install of the OS on it.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Marcus Hardy]

Okay, thank you to everyone for the replies!

Don, thank you for that, I have in the past freaked out at my media being ‘offline’ due to proxy mode, but alas, that is not the case here. Though they really should have a different colour for things like that…

Loren, I’ve tried that tactic, repairing the event file and removing all the media located therein, but this too only results in the program to hang on loading the event.

T. Payton, my first thought was third party plugins especially those from Neat Video and Coremelt, two that I use heavily in this project. However after cleanly removing them, and pretty much every other plugin I have, this still doesn’t get me past the pinwheel.

This is the problem I discovered and will lead me to NOT use compound clips as often in the future for feature work. Compound clips being virtual clips and not actual physical clips, results in anything in FCPX that was in a compound clip and associated and located in that event becomes unreachable. You are unable to open the compound clip and peer inside, and because their is no physical media as far as FCPX is concerned, you cannot relink it to an event that DOES have all the media.

More details regarding the actual event, it is the main event that I started with this film and as a result has about 90% of the media associated with it. The others were created for ADR,VFX, and compound clips. However, and much to my dismay, most of my compound clips actually ended up located in the initial event. The film we made is a small budget sci fi, with ALL of its vfx being done in FCPX, as a result LOTS of compound clips were made to store composites. And then compound clips were made of scenes, OR later on, segments of the film. This is where we ran into problems. Our main, finished timeline is all compound clips, with compound clips inside each of them. In hindsight this was stupid, and in the rush and thrill of working on this film I neglected to realize how many compound clips were being ‘created’, I always did like it the way it was before…

Anyways, straight details: Event in question is 395.5 mbs in size with lots of compound clips inside it.

I’ve tried creating a new user (what i’m writing on now) and its still hanging at the load screen.

The only bright gleaming note in this is that Charlie’s advice provided potential pay dirt with revealing this little detail:

2013-05-20 10:53:55.591 PM Final Cut Pro[8230]: CoreData: error: (1) I/O error for database at /Volumes/RAID/Final Cut Events/Cold Lights/CurrentVersion.fcpevent. SQLite error code:1, ‘too many SQL variables’

Now I have no idea how to read this, but my guess is that my project has too many compound clips for FCPX to measure and as a result it freaks out and doesn’t load.

Any ideas on what I can do?

[Charlie Austin]

[Marcus Hardy] “2013-05-20 10:53:55.591 PM Final Cut Pro[8230]: CoreData: error: (1) I/O error for database at /Volumes/RAID/Final Cut Events/Cold Lights/CurrentVersion.fcpevent. SQLite error code:1, ‘too many SQL variables’

Now I have no idea how to read this, but my guess is that my project has too many compound clips for FCPX to measure and as a result it freaks out and doesn’t load.

Any ideas on what I can do?”

No idea, but I’d paste that info into the FCP X feedback form right away, and leave contact info. Also, I believe digital rebellion makes an app that will attempt to repair an FCP X database (which is what an event or project is). However, I wouldn’t mess with the original at all. Try the feedback form, and tell ’em your situation, they do read that stuff. 🙂

Here’s an old discussion at apple about the same issue…

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4034983?start=0&tstart=0

————————————————————-

~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[T. Payton]

Marcus,

[Marcus Hardy] “Neat Video and Coremelt, two that I use heavily in this project”

[Marcus Hardy] “Our main, finished timeline is all compound clips, with compound clips inside each of them.”

Interestingly that this is exactly how I built my film with the exception of Neat Video. Can you give me a call. Find the contact number at my web site onecreative.net. Ask for T.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Michael Hadley]

You say your event is 400 mb? For a feature? That is tiny. It should be 400 GIGA bytes or more, right?

There’s no way your actual media can be in that event. Instead, it must be filled with pointers to the actual media. In other words, the media was never copied into the event itself; instead, it was linked to it. If you changed the organization or drive the actual media was one, you would be having major offline media issue. You need to re-import/re-link the media to restore the connections.

Hopefully that’s the case.