Multicam clips have gone grey in storyline. Can’t relink.

[Joe Marler]

[Tangier Clarke] “My storyline was working fine on my home computer, but bring the project to work, everything is now all grey. An attempt to relink or show in browser gives this message:

“Failure to reveal clip. The original clip could not be found or reconstructed”

The library is running from the same mobile drive between home and work.”

Tangier, you always hit the difficult problems. I’ve never seen that but Google shows a few people over the years who have. BTW the exact syntax is “Failed to reveal clip”.

Since it’s on a mobile drive it’s being frequently ejected and reconnected. I’d suggest running Disk Utility First Aid. Actually before that make an image backup of the drive.

It could be some kind of FCPX database damage. If this is a managed library the file should be there. Can you open the library in Finder and locate the file? One possibility is the file is there and the database pointer and associated metadata is not correct, the other possibility is the file itself is missing or damaged. If you can locate and play the file from Finder, then you know the file is there.

It could also be a developing bad block on the drive which exceeded retry count. That said you’d normally see a hard error or S.M.A.R.T drive warning, not wrong results on at the application layer. The only Mac HDD surface scanning tool I’ve used is Scannerz: https://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html

There are other tools like DiskTestR but they rely on writing test data (non-destructively) to fill up the drive while monitoring errors: https://diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

I assume the mobile drive is formatted HFS+, not exFAT.

[Tangier Clarke]

The video file is in the mulitcam are there in the library package when looking at the Finder level.

The multicam clip itself is perfectly fine in the the browser (same event as the project). It’s only greyed on the storyline. Double clicking it on the storyline will not reveal the clip components and as I mentioned above you cannot “Reveal in browser” on any of these clips.

The disk (HFS+/ GUID Partition Map) seems to check out without problems, both in Disk Utility and in LaCie’s RAID software.

I tried exporting an XML of the edit and then importing that XML. The resulting edit is even worse. The grey clips have been reduced to two huge blocks like FCP X gaps and they have no clip name, nor the edits in the mutlicam clip I made.

I also tried opening several backup files with no success. Backup files that were created before this happened still resulted with the multicam clips being dark grey and unusable.

It’s too bad I can’t find a way to replace all of these bad clips on my timeline with the same points of the browser multicam clip that exists.

Fortunately the edits was final and I happened to export a Quicktime right before this happened, but this type of problem gives me a lot of concern; particularly since there’s not a lot of meaning error reporting in FCP X to help me figure out what’s going on.