I’m not an expert but a basic thought for you. Davinci stores projects in a database. So it’s not a simple question of writing a file to any available drive as far as I am aware.

On the night shots with a flamethrower. This is – I’m guessing – primarily a question of exposure and tonal scale range. Perhaps one of the clips is exposed for good…

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Do you have the “MediaInfo” app? It will tell everything about a video file. I’m wondering if the .MOV file is simply a different container for the older footage still encoded as DCT – the miniDV standard? MediaInfo is a utility every videographer and editor should have; its free or cheap depending.

Compressor should be your friend here. Try outputting a ProRes version and then encode that as H264 in Compressor. (And I’m curious how large the ProRes file itself is!)

Honestly this sounds like you don’t fully understand how to setup the profile of a timeline or export. These numbers suggest that what you are actually exporting must be encoded as ProRes, even if it has the file extension of MP4,.

You should get “MediaInfo” a great free app for examining any media file to learn exactly what it is and how it was made.

To understand your situation, WHY are you planning to switch editing environments “in the middle” of your project? What benefit are you expecting?

I’m not an expert but the XML export can work pretty well especially if you’re on the same machine with all the files still in the location. I’ve done this once and it worked.

Just a suggestion. I would try transcoding the footage without changing the frame rate just to simplify the problem. Seems like “frame corruption” would be less likely to happen.

Two thoughts, mostly conceptual. First I would start with the synchronized moments. Find those and the rest falls wherever it seems.

Second, though this isn’t the way you would deliver it, I would resize and position each of 10 layers of video so that I could see them all on one screen (or even output that for reflection).

Very curious. I’ve been using FCP 10 for more than 10 years. I saw a very similar behavior some years ago. I would go to edit a title text and backspace would crash it. My workaround – may help you? – was to use the mouse to select and cut and paste to edit this text. The problem I was seeing went away two revs later.

I’ve used a variety of external drives from the vendor OWC. I started with a single Firewire drive. Now I’m using their 4-drive enclosure with Thunderbolt. You can populate it with one drive to start or up to four.

Media Info is a great tool for seeing what’s really in any media file. Available in the Apple App Store and as a direct download too I believe.

In your experience, what are several of the worst bugs you’ve seen? I’m not aware of any significant problems but my work may be too simple to encounter some issues. For me, generally FCP has been stable and a bit amazing that when it did crash (mostly 4+ years ago), I lost nothing I had just done.