Troubles when rendering in FCP HD 4.5

[Randyp]

Correction, the error message I get is “no movies in file.” (I just tried rendering again and that’s what pooped up)

Randy

Your are:
1. Untalented but excessively persistent
2. Unbelieveably stupid
3. An artist
4. All of the above

Normal Rockwell

[Randyp]

I believe we’ve solved this rendering problem.

It came about after wiping the hard drive and reinstalling software on the G5 in an effort to solve another, bigger problem I am having with FCP HD 4.5 (See “Can’t Open some FCP Project Files after changes have been made and saved” I posted on September 1, 2005).

Here are some of the circumstances which led to the rendering problem referred to in this posting; I hope by recounting them here it might give a clue to someone else with similar problems:

I found that the reason I was getting the “No Movie in File” error was because FCP was not recognizing some of the LiveType .ipr files I was using for titles. Once before I had a problem with FCP not recognizing LiveType .ipr files. At that time it turned out that I was trying to use an incorrect version of Quicktime (too recent an upgrade–QT 7.0) and could not activate Quicktime Pro with the software key that came with FCP HD 4.5. That problem was solved by reinstalling an older version of Quicktime (QT 6.5.1) and then activating the Quicktime Pro key. This time the reason .ipr files were not recognized was partially due to losing some of the fonts LiveType had been previously connected to. This loss of connection came because of another reinstall of OS X 10.3.9.

OS X 10.3.9 was reinstalled because I had run into a problem while reinstalling software and firmware for the AJA IO connected to the system. After reinstalling AJA IO software and restarting the G5, I kept getting the shaded “restart computer” screen over and over and had no choice but to reinstall OS X.

After OS X 10.3.9 was reinstalled, AJA IO software and firmware was reinstalled, and AJA IO settings were made in FCP HD 4.5, I tried to edit in FCP and ran into the rendering problem mentioned in these postings. At first it was one small area on the timeline indicated in red which would not render. I tried a number of things to clear it up including dumping all the render files from the scratch drive. That aggrivated the render headache, but it eventually led to discovering it was an .ipr recognition problem. I closed and restarted my FCP project and saw a message stating that a font (Book Antiqua) was missing from the titles made in LiveType.

Opening the Font Book, I discovered that font and some others were gone. Checking the font folder revealed that those missing fonts were no longer listed as font files but as “unix executable files.”

I called for help from our in-houe IT guy. (He didn’t set up the system, but inherited it from a techically-savy former employee who is sorely missed at times like this.) We checked our Quicktime version (see above) and saw it still good. We tried reinstalling Font Book, the font folder, and downloaded and ran the Fontbook Helper program. We were able to reinstall the font I needed. We opened Livetype and saw that the fot worked. We resaved the Livetype file but FCP still wouldn’t recognize it.

Finally we reinstalled FCP HD 4.5 and LiveType, thinking maybe we’d lost some connection after reinstalling OS X. Evidently this is true because FCP is now recognizing the .ipr files and is rendering them without any trouble. (by the way, our AJA IO settings remained intact after the FCP reinstall.)

Hope some of this painful saga helps someone else in troubleshooting FCP in the future.

Randy

Your are:
1. Untalented but excessively persistent
2. Unbelieveably stupid
3. An artist
4. All of the above

Normal Rockwell