Lost files in FCP

[Adam Taylor]

Hi Malcolm (why is your name so familiar?) – you might try a little application i found on the web a while ago called “What Size” – this will search your entire hard drive and list everything (including hidden files) and show you how big the files are.
It is really useful for tracking down large files or finding why your hard drive is suddenly full. Be careful how you use it as it quite easy to delete a file without knowing exactly what it is.

Its possible that your render was so big that you ran out disc space before the render completed.

I think that may be the case here because you say the media is on an external drive, yet its used up loads of laptop disc space. It has probably rendered a huge cache of data but run out of space and not finished the process..therefore using up space but not showing the final movie.

Out of interest – what format are you rendering, and how long is the finished edit?
Digital Heaven have a free downloadable dashboard widget that will tell you how much disc space is needed for various formats/codecs based on running times…could be a useful thing to have. Bear in mind you will need more disc space than is shown, simply because discs use free space to shuffle data during read/write operations

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Malcolm Brabant]

Hi Adam
I am a BBC one man band correspondent, perhaps that’s why the name is familiar.
I also have a youtube site called Brabantfeatures.
Thanks for the assistance I will now go and dig.
I am exporting a sequence as a film. It’s about 70 minutes long.
And I am bewildered.
I will get back to you.
My email is malcolm.brabant@gmail.com
best
Malcolm

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I have had experience of a ‘disappearing’ movie export, when using a stranger’s Mac.
I could ‘see’ that the exported movie existed – it was there in the list if I reopened the FCP Export dialogue box – visible in the file-structure view of the dialogue box. But I couldn’t retrieve the movie from the Finder – it was effectively invisible.

I put this down to an OS X User/permissions and as it wasn’t my computer to fiddle with I just used the workaround of saving my movie again to my own FW drive which had no permissions issues.

[Malcolm Brabant]

Thank Paul and Adam,
I have resolved the issue by buying whatsize.
The file was buried in volumes in a folder with the name of the external hard drive.
The mystery to me is why finder and sherlock failed to find the film with the correct name.
And Adam, Whatsize was a real whizz.
Thanks again.
I do have one more question.
I normally shoot in 4×3 on a panasonic dvx 100.
For my son’s school play I shot on anamorphic 16x 9 so I could coordinate my footage with another shooter.
I have managed to create the project and film on 16 and 9.
But when I try to re-export it to the camera to put it on tape, I find that it is coming out squeezed, despite adjusting the settings on teh camera to (either letter box or squeeze)
Any suggestions?

[Adam Taylor]

ahh yes, of course…BBC news correspondent – thats where i have heard your name. Used to be an ITV regional news vt editor myself – glad i’m out of that game now!

Ok – question – is the timeline you edited on set to anamorphic? From memory as i’m not in front of fcp right now, its four or five down in the Sequence menu. If not, then click the anamorphic checkbox.

I’m a little puzzled when you said the format you output was a “film”. I was asking what file format / codec you are using to edit and playout the material. That can often have a bearing on the kind of problems you may be having.

regards
Adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk