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Project file would not open after rendering, but got it open again
Had a situation I just worked through, which might help others when they can’t open a FCP project file. Here is the saga for anyone interested:
Used to have frequent problems trying to open some previously saved project files when I was using FCP 4.5 (check my previous posts about that), but those problems mostly disappeared after upgrading to FCP 5.0.4, at least until late last week. In my current project, working with FCP 5.0.4, I’d opened an old FCP 4.5 project file to find some video clips I wanted to transfer over. I copied the clips and pasted them into the new project. I rendered the change, saved the project, and closed FCP down for the weekend (I don’t usually leave FCP running overnight or on weekends because of past troubles–again see previous posts). Coming back on Monday, I tried to reopen my project, but FCP “unexpectedly closed down.” I spent part of the last three days trying to get the project back where it was on Friday. The following are things I tried until I was finally successful; maybe they’ll give someone else a clue on what to try:
Went back though my auto-saved copies (I auto-save every seven minutes) and finally found one that would open, which was auto-saved an hour and a half before I shut down on Friday. I copied all the clips over to a new sequence and saved that new version, unrendered, to a new file name. (Note: Not everything in the project needed rendering, but there were many clips with filters applied and various transitions along the timeline, from beginning to end, that did.) I rendered the new version, closed the project and tried to reopen. Again FCP “unexpectedly closed down.” I could open the unrendered version, but not the rendered version. (For what it’s worth, I could make a QuickTime Movie of the entire project, but couldn’t open a rendered version.)
Began to trouble-shoot the system. I completely rebooted the Mac and Medea. I trashed and restored preferences using FCP Rescue. I used the Disk Utility to restore disk permissions on both the Mac and Medea, and repair some minor problems detected on my Medea. I opened the unrendered version and re-rendered, but a rendered version of the project would still not open.
Finally began marking in and out points and using “Render Selection” or “Render Between In and Out” under the Sequence Menu, I began rendering small portions at a time, saving the file to a new name, closing it, and seeing if it would open again. I did this from the beginning until I hit an “unopenable” file. Then I worked from the end of the project back to the beginning until I hit a problem.
Had it narrowed down to a small segment of eight clips, with a nest on each end of the segment. I moved each clip to a new, separate track on the timeline, and turned those eight tracks off. One at a time I turned the tracks back on, rendered, saved the file to a new name (I used the file name but added a different letter of the alphabet to the end–I got up to “j”) , closed the project, and tried to reopen the file.
Found that both nests seemed to be the trouble spots. Nick Ryan, a co-worker here, suggested using “Reconnect to Media” on each one, so I did, “reconnecting” the clips within each nest. That solved the problem with the first nest, which was a “stand alone” clip, without any transitions or filters. The second nest was connected to another clip with a Boris Red Transition. I found that I could delete the transition, render the project, save it, close it, and open it again. I reapplied a fresh version of the same transition, rendered the project, saved it, closed it, and found, at last, that I could open the whole thing in a rendered state.
Don’t know conclusively what the exact problems were, but I got the thing working again. My guess is maybe more than one thing was involved, including somewhere along the line a few clips within my project losing their connections to the source media within FCP and maybe within the Boris Red plug-in. The trouble-shooting approach was broad to begin with, but narrowed down to the problem areas in the end.
FCP 5.0.4 has been so stable and smooth I’d gotten out of some routine maintenance that may have contributed to the build up of potential problems. In the future, I’ll run the disk utility on a regular basis, like I used to do during the old FCP 4.5 days. I’ll also completely shut down the Mac, Medea, and Io every week or so, and reboot so the systems can reinitialize and clean-out any garbage accumulated in temporary memory.
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2 Replies
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Have you updated Boris Red in the last several months? Hopefully you updated to Red 3.04. The newest version 3.05 doesn’t work on FCP 5.0.4. It may be that Red had some issues if you were using a version older than 3.04 with FCP 5.0.4. I’m not sure if you can still get the Red update to 3.04 from Boris since their website doesn’t list that update for Mac.
You may also have had a corrupt clip or clips since that will sometimes mess things up in a nest or on the timeline.
Hopefully all the bugs are worked out now.
Doug Olin
Desert Vistas Multimedia
http://www.desertvistasmm.com -
Just checked to be sure. We’re running Boris Red 3.04. Thanks for asking.
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