[Jonathan Eagan]

Hi Shane,

I think you misunderstood me, or I ‘mispoke’, I’m obviously not suggesting that FCP would have in any way made allowances for a third party program like MPEG STREAMCLIP. That would be crazy, only that it feels wrong that you can’t specify tape based / tapeless in an attempt to re-encode footage for an online. It seems to me that if I was to open each card from each day of shooting and load them into the L & T window and then ask to batch capture my media managed sequence that it could, or should, in a better world, know enough to reference that media I was pointing to, without it having been initially Logged and Transferred. That would be awesome. That’s all I meant to suggest by “design flaw”.

Our media was organized by Shoot Day (D1, D2) and Card Number (Card 1, Card 2….Card 65) in ascending order as we shot. The files were never moved or renamed so I was hopeful that the process could work. I was wrong.

Unfortunately the time pressures of independent features don’t always allow for thorough testing or for a given workflow. I unfortunately had no assistant on this one, and felt it best to convert using MPEG Streamclip in the BG so that I could manage transcoding, syncing (PluralEyes), logging, and editing duties more or less simultaneously. Though at this stage it becomes apparent that my workflow has flaws due to a ‘lack of experience’, In hindsight I’m not sure I could have afforded using L & T to make our final online easier. I don’t believe I could have done it any other way and stayed on schedule.

Thank you though for the mention about ProRes LT vs Proxy. I have been ‘offlining’ with LT exclusively and was only recently introduced to the concept of Proxy as a better alternative, something I overlooked.

[Jonathan Eagan]

Thanks Shane,

yeah – it’s really unfortunate. I wasn’t entirely forthcoming in my first post as I hadn’t yet dug in and done the hours of research I now have: I used MPEG Streamclip to convert the clips initially. Even though all the media is on the same drive in the same place, I obviously never used L & T to initially convert and so I guess this problem boils down to – no metadata, no assigned reel number, no way it’s going to work.

It’s a terrible design flaw in my opinion because for someone in my position – low budget feature shot on DSLR, no editorial assistant, tight timeline, using MPEG Streamclip is a godsend because it enables me to multitask in FCP, logging and syncing while I’m encoding ProRes files for offline in the background. I honestly never would have thought to use anything else. Oh well, lesson learned. It’s evident shooting a feature on DSLR has it’s own specific set of challenges.

Thanks for the help.

[Jonathan Eagan]

I should add that my workflow was completely straightforward:

Captured footage was converted to ProRes LT and an offline edit was made. I’ve used media manager to prep the sequence today but all master clips are still persevered in their original file structure on the drive.

Please help if possible :).

Thank you!

[Jonathan Eagan]

Oddly enough it seems I”ve fixed the problem. Though I do agree I’ll need to either run Disk Warrior or trash my prefs or both eventually.

It seems that only the sequences themselves were the issue. If I copied the footage in the open timeline into a new sequence the problem went away and I was able to save and rename them.

One of the first sequences that I created didn’t have the issue so I simply duped it and replaced the others.

Pretty odd, huh…?

[Jonathan Eagan]

Thanks for the help everyone.

looks like the issue was nothing more than a file corruption on their end. The production office wasn’t able to open the project either and had to fall back to an Auto-save version to make things work.

Everything is working fine now. Thank God.

[Jonathan Eagan]

Hi,

sorry for the confusion. I’ll elaborate.

As I mentioned in another post above, I’m working remotely right now and the director sent me a project file from the production office that was created using FCP 6.

Now they are aware that I’m running FCP 7 and they themselves are going to be updating next week. I wondered if there was any way something they might have done on their end could be contributing to my problem. I don’t want to inform them yet of the situation until I’m sure it’s not my system, yunno?

Either way – when I import the media I was sent on the drive I don’t encounter any problems, so I’m guessing there’s no corrupted file.

[Jonathan Eagan]

yeah.

that’s what I was afraid of.

Okay – let me ask you this though:

if I do a ground up install – and it still doesn’t solve the problem. I can safely say that the issue is something to do with a file corruption or something on their end?

Thanks so much for your help.

[Jonathan Eagan]

Hi David,

okay – tried this again, to no avail.

The problem is, when I try to open this project, the very first thing it prompts me to do is update the file with a pop up window. If I choose ‘yes’ it begins updating, freezes and crashes. If I choose ‘no’, it simply opens a new project and I get nowhere.

So I can’t even get to a place where it’s showing my media as offline.

So…now what?

[Jonathan Eagan]

Thanks.

Tried that, and it did not work.

I can open FCP without any problems, can even import the project media, etc, etc but if I try to launch or open that bloody FCP 6 project file it crashes.

BTW – all it says is FCP quit unexpectedly. There’s not further explanation.

It’s only using the FCS Maintence pack that was suggested above that I have any inkling that it’s plugin related. I’m completely at a loss here.

Is there any way this could be a problem on their end? Should I just wipe my system and reinstall? I really don’t want to do that, if at all avoidable.

Thanks!

[Jonathan Eagan]

Okay – I think I’ve discovered the issue – it’s likely got something to do with an incompatible plugin being used. I don’t know how to go about searching this out because there is no way to open the project and check, even off line.

It seems that even if I wipe my system it won’t solve my problem. Please help? How do I suss out this faulty plugin????