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The movie file “.*.mov” cannot be found. Without this file, the movie cannot play properly
I used Media Manager to “move” all files for a project from my scratch disk to my laptop disk, so that I could edit on the road. Oh, man, am I sorry I did that.
Now, when I try to open the project, FCP gives me two, equally mystifying error messages.
First, it says “The movie file Abby_8_CUAbby.mov cannot be found. Without this file, the movie cannot play properly.” Then, when I click “Search,” an open file Finder dialog box opens up with the named file (i.e., Abby_8_CUAbby.mov) sitting right there smack in the middle of it. I click on it, click OK, and then FCP takes a minute and tells me that the *next* file “cannot be found.” I click OK, and there it is, right in the Finder/dialog box window. This happens over and over again.
The second is when it says that the movie file “Torin and Justin alo#AA6153.mov” cannot be found, when it is trying to reconnect to the video for a file, and a clip, named “Torin and Justin alone_1a_Master.vid2.mov.” I tried renaming the latter file to the former name, and Finder wouldn’t let me! It said the name was already taken! I had to use Terminal to rename the file.
I tried saving the project as a new one. It did not help.
How do I de-ghost this project?mac osx 10.6.8
Final Cut Studio 6 -
4 Replies
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What you have discovered is what is referred to as “illegal characters.” You should never use #, _, %, etc, in a file name. Now you know…
FYI, if you ever bring your project to a finishing editor, colorist, etc., the same thing is liable to happen. So, the moral of the story is, use dashes (-), as they are legal, but NEVER ever use other non-alpha numeric characters, or you will encounter these types of issues.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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This happens if you export a Quicktime Reference movie, and reimport it to edit…and then move the media or remove the media, or try to open the QT reference on a computer without that media present. The QT reference file REFERENCES that QT file. Move it, and it can’t find it. And there’s no way to RECONNECT a QT reference movie to a clip once you moved it.
Delete those references from your project.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Shane: That is exactly what I did, with the QT reference movie. I had no idea.
Since I cannot “reconnect” to it, what on earth do I do? I tried renaming the actual video file — i.e., renaming “Torin and Justin alone_1a_Master.vid2.mov” to “Torin and Justin alo#AA6153.mov” — but the FCP project did not recognize it. Why not?mac osx 10.6.8
Final Cut Studio 6 -
There is no easy way around it. Basically, after starting final cut pro I hit [Esc] every time the error message appeared, and then clicked on the “missing” file, until the messages were all gone and the project opened. Then I deleted any browser object that was linked to a reference movie, and any browser object that was unused. I got it down to three browser clips that still gave me the error message on opening, and the [Esc] + click-on-the-“missing”-file process is fast enough that I could still use the project with the three annoying errors at file open.
mac osx 10.6.8
Final Cut Studio 6
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