When FCP crashes, can it default to come back up to my “arrange” settings?

[Jeremy Garchow]

No, but you can assign a keystorke to your favorite screen setting. After the crash, hit the keystroke, and you will be editing happily ever after, until the next crash.

Jeremy

[Debe]

To be honest, FCP shouldn’t be crashing so often that this should be a thing you would post.

Maybe it’s time to take a look at your setup and make sure it’s opertaing optimally.

There’s an article in the first issue of the Creative COW magazine about building a rock solid FCP system. That may even be the title…

debe

[Dan Riley]

I hadn’t had a crash in weeks until yesterday’s quicktime update.
It took two restarts of the Mac and today, no crashes all day.
Anyway, it brought up this problem because when FCP crashes and you bring it back up,
you have to go through a bunch of steps to get back to where you were.
First it starts up in a very old save, then you have to go to arrange
and get your window setting back, then you have to restore the project.
It’s too many steps I think. If I’m the only one who thinks this way,
OK, so I’m weird.

Dan

[Debe]

There’s FCP Attic as well as FCP Rescue that let you back up your settings. Every time you make a dramatic change to your settings that you’d like to be able to restore, just use the backup feature. Then when it’s necessary, use the restore feature. Google should get you those.

You could also backup favorite keyboard layouts and other customizable goodies from the Final Cut Pro User Data folder in your [user name]>Library>Preferences. (FCP Attic may do this. I’m not certain)

That should get you most of the way home. Do you save your custom window layout after you’re rearranged thing to your liking in the Window>Arrange>Save Window Layout? Then you should be able to restore that at any time using Window>Arrange>Load Window Layout.

Still, FCP crashing even every few weeks feels problematic to me. I haven’t had a crash in months and months and months, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a crash that wiped out my customizable settings.

Trashing preferences will do that, but never because of a crash, that I can recall.

& I have it on very good authority that I’m the weird one….

;P

debe

[Dan Riley]

Nothing wiped out my customized settings. That’s not what I said.
I said when FCP comes out of a crash you have to go through multiple
steps to get everything back to where you left off, and I think
this operation could be handled better, that’s all.
The idea of setting up a key stroke for this purpose is something
I will look into (mentioned in another post as well). I generally don’t
customize my keyboard but I’m not opposed to it.

As far as you not having an FCP crash for months, that is really unusual
from my experience and others in the pro field I work with. When doing
chroma keys or using anything Boris, it comes with the territory in my
experience. Also when doing multiple layers of effects, stuff happens.
You must have the most stable system that there has ever been.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that 🙂

Dan

[Debe]

Hoo-boy—

I really mis-read the issue. Sorry.

As for my system….it stable for two reasons…1) my technogeek and 2) it’s only a production machine. No email, no internet, no Excel, no Word, no QuickBooks. All of the “admin” stuff is done on other computers.

The technogeek does most installs & updates and makes sure everything is cloned and/or backed up and properly buttoned up. There’s no real secret, other than housekeeping must be done, even on a Mac. Lucky for me, I have someone else to do it.

I don’t have any actual proof that this is the reason, but so far, it’s not let me down.

debe

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Danrnw] “The idea of setting up a key stroke for this purpose is something
I will look into”

It’s so easy you don’t even know it, and there might already be a keystroke associated with it. Hit option-j, and in the search box type layout. You will see a bunch of things for layout, scroll down to Window layout 1. You might see a keyboard shortcut next to it already (such as control-shift-6). If there’s one assigned for you already, remember that one. You can also change, or add your own keyboard shortcut.

SO next time you crash, open FCP and hit control-shift-6, or your own custom keystroke, and you should be back to your liking. This assumes that you have saved your layout as you want it and it is the first layout available in the arrange menu at the bottom of the ‘stock’ layouts. If you have more than layout, then learn the keystroke, or create your own keystroke for those in window layouts 1-6. And I totally here you regarding Boris and multi-layered effects, stuff happens. Sometimes, you can feel yourself working faster than the computer, and then bomb-o.

Jeremy