[Richard Day]

I see that his issue has been addressed elsewhere. I’ll try to digest it! I think my setting I/O points caused my problem.

[Richard Day]

My all-time favorite font is Strayhorn Bold from fonts.com. Slightly condensed, clean, and superb for titles and credits. I’m also fond of Benguiat Gothic for a casual look, and Neo Sans for clean, smaller text, such as in a table. Panache is sans serif, too, with a kind of humanistic feel.

fonts.com is not a site for budget fonts, but has great stuff.

myfonts.com is also nice; they have their “WhatTheFont” feature in which you can upload a small graphic or screenshot, and it will analyze it and give you the closest matches. Excellent tool!

[Richard Day]

I have a Panasonic 450, and use it with a G5 powerMac and a DeckLink Extreme card. The only issue I have had is a polling problem, where FCP thinks there’s a tape problem because the 450 can’t respond fast enough. There are two solutions I know of:

— Use a Keyspan USB to serial converter for device control (you specify the Keyspan port in your DEvice control setup).
— Use a plug-in called DisableAltETTPolling.txt

I’m currently using the second method, but the first was fine as well.

It’s possible the the 455 will not cause the same problems as the 450…

[Richard Day]

Actually, things are now worse. I rebooted into my “disaster recovery” (damaged FCP) drive, exported clips only. These imported successfully into my new FCP on my main drive. Sequences did not, however. Log error was “could not create sequence”. Even a brand-new sequence with Slug only, created on the damaged-FCP drive, and imported as XML, would not open in my new FCP.

Reinstalled FCP Studio on main drive. Compressor would not get past splash screen. Opening Compressor from within FCP got me Compressor’s Settings window, but I could not create a new batch. Performed Apple’s recommendations on removing Compressor, reinstall FCS — no improvement.

Ran FCS Remover to eliminate every damned trace of the suite, reinstalled entire suite with media from 8 DVD’s. Each program gives one bounce, nothing more, except for Final Cut Studio, which was fine. There was no Final Cut Pro User Data folder after running FCS Remover and after reinstalling FCS,so I replaced it from my old drive. Still no improvement.

Removed prefs, reinstalled FCS — now from disk images!! — but without running FCS Remover. Now I get three bounces and nothing more.

Removed 2 innocuous Digital Heaven plug-ins; removed DeckLink drivers. Rebooted. No improvement.

What about that missing Final Cut Pro User Data folder after running FCS Remover? Is this a cause of trouble?

Next on my list:
I will run FCS Remover, do *another* Archive and Install, do *another* complete install of FCS.

— Just received Leopard from Apple Canada, Should I upgrade in the hope that totally starting fresh, system-wise, might help? (You can be sure I’d do an Erase and Install!)

I no longer consider Final Cut Studio a stable suite of software. I had a couple of months of misery a year ago involving device control (Panasonic DVCPro 450). Did over a hundred tests. Finally found a new posting from Sweden that solved my problem back then.

And please, Apple, have your software engineers put in an hour’s work and give us an uninstaller. We have work to do.

[Richard Day]

I tested data read speed from capture disk- it was fine.

I think I’ve narrowed my problem down to what must be the worst-case: my copy of FCP itself is damaged and created damaged project files. Here’s more of what I did:

– created new project with ONLY slug — same playback problems! FCP choked on setting an in point on the fly several times fairly rapidly. So was it FCP or a display problem (e.g. QuickTime)?
– Archive and installed new OS X 10.4.11, fresh QuickTime 7.3.1, reinstall FCP. Opening all recent projects crashed FCP. (As opposed to opening them but having playback problems.) Trying successively earlier AutoSave Vault files by double-clicking them also crashed newly-installed FCP. Earlier projects (e.g. a few months ago) open fine.
— deleted render files. FCP still crashed on opening recent projects
– renamed Capture scratch folder to (I hope) “hide” possibly corrupted media files — still crashed on opening.
– rebooted from my backup drive (which still would have the problems preserved), opened small recent project with FCP, exported XML, rebooted into main drive, tried to import XML into a new project — crash.

I wonder if my problems started when I updated to FCP 6.02?

I am going to clone my backup drive to a third drive — which will now be a “disaster-recovery drive” — so I can continue to experiment with FCP and project files as they were before my re-install of OS X, QuickTime and FCP, and still be able to backup my regular work as normal on my backup drive.

Other things I may try:
– more limited XML export of •parts• of problem project files (booting from the other drive)
– try to determine on what date I updated to 6.02 to see if that’s where problems began

This seems to be a case where our normal safeguards, e.g. AutoSave Vault, XML, backups, may not help me.

Thanks for your help, and your patience in reading all these details.

[Richard Day]

Thanks for the tip; I freed up lots of space, but there’s no improvement.