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Words you definitely don’t want to see when you open a motion project: NOW what?
I’ve been working on a motion 4 project I stared a year ago and resumed work on this Monday. Made great progress all week adding more elements (there’s over 50 pieces in this, mostly stills and text ) and pretty much finished the thing, just nee to re-open it and teak the camera path and maybe a few little position keyframes here and there.
The thing is pretty large and unwieldy, Motion has hung up and crashed numerous times this week, and out of nervousness, i’ve been saving all including the media files, to an external drive as well as an internal RAID where the masters all reside.
I go to open>recent> the version I worked on yesterday. I get:
“The document (title of my project) could not be opened”
There is plenty of drive space in the drive where the project and its media are stored. Trying the versions ont he RAID and the external gets the same unreadable result.
I opened an earlier version from the day before, not as complete, and it was okay for a while until it too hung and I had to force quit it. Re-starting Motion 4 and re-opening that file, I now get the same “document could not be opened” response for it as I did for the first file. Somehow all the work is getting progressively corrupted, and I don’t know how to recover it.
I am starting to panic as I don’t want to have to build this “year-in-the-making” project from scratch at home over the weekend to meet next week’s deadline. My home machine is newer and more powerful then the office machine, I have tried to copy over everything I can think of to a portable 1TB drive to take home and see what I can recover/repair/rebuild there this weekend.
Looking for any and all advice on what tricks to try, and what is happening.
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5 Replies
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What a terrible situation, I feel for you. Have you go into your autosave files? They may be more recent ones there that you can use.
Another idea would be to try to open the file in Motion 5.—
Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net -
Sorry for stating the obvious and I’m sure you’ve thought of trashing your Motion preference – it’s just that you didn’t mention it.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hm, last post didn’t make it..
Well, just got back from lunch, the day is saved. Plugged the portable drive into my home imac which is newer and vastly superior to my office quad-core, and found a recovered version that’s complete except for missing three specific fonts, which I can deal with. On the downside, this means I will have to finish the work over the weekend at home, on the upside, there will be no H.R. complaints about me compositing in my pyjamas while drinking, eating, and playing loud music. Well, the kids might complain, but to heck with THEM 🙂
I went looking for the Motion autosave vault but only found FCp icons in the vaults that appeared. Is there a specific place to find the Motion auto vault, and doesn’t Motion create one from day one or do you have to set one manually?
Now that I know the money is safe, I can go trash the motion prefs without worry at work, and see if the work machine gets back to functioning… are they located the same way as FCP pref files?
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I’m not on 4 anymore but you can set the autosave location in Preferences – so also find out where it is from there as well.
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Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net -
[Mark Suszko] “Now that I know the money is safe, I can go trash the motion prefs without worry at work, and see if the work machine gets back to functioning… are they located the same way as FCP pref files?”
Use Digital Rebellion’s Preference Manager – you can’t go wrong with that for Motion as well as everything else.
Best of luck with the project.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
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