[Saya Hillman]

Do you have the deck and drive on the same bus?
Not sure how I know this? My deck is connected through FW straight to computer; drive conneted through seperate FW straight to computer.

How’s the burner connected?
USB hub

You don’t have any capture cards do you?
No (not that I know of)

Do you have read/write permissions on your media drive in general?
Both my 2 ext LaCie’s (Big Disk and d2) say read/write.
My system HD, it’s grayed out — I can’t select any of the options. It says Read Only though.

Do you have another machine to try and open it up on?
No

===============

I’ll try your disconnection suggestions.

Re. repairing permissions using disk utility — can this make things even worse?

Weird that you can open it and I can’t.

[Saya Hillman]

Before you sent me the FCP rescue, I did the following (from Apple site):

1. Quit Final Cut Pro 4.
2. Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
3. From the Go menu, choose Go to Folder.
4. Type: ~/Library/Preferences/ Note: The tilde “~” refers to your home directory. For more information see “Mac OS X: Using Your Home Directory”.
5. Click Go.
6. Drag the file named “com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist” to the Trash (Figure 1).
7. Double-click the folder named “Final Cut Pro User Data”.
8. Drag the file named “Final Cut Pro 4.0 Preferences” to the Trash (see Figure 2).
9. Drag the file named “Final Cut Pro POA Cache” to the Trash (Figure 2).
10. Open Final Cut Pro.

==============================

Other devices connected to my computer:
1. Sony miniDV deck
2. Two printers
3. Cassette deck
4. Occasionaly, I’ll swap another LaCie HD with the miniDV deck
5. Ext burner

================================

There are no stills or graphics. All I’ve done thus far is import and edit footage. No titles, no effects, no text, no photos, etc.

Due to space shortage, I did have some media on one LaCie and some on the other, but was able to switch it all to one about two weeks ago. No problems when I did that.

The only main difference in the past week or so that I can think of is that I had Garageband open at the same time as FCP. While I was logging a tape in FCP, I was also importing a cassette into GB. Too much?

[Saya Hillman]

Nope, same general error issue.

Quit FCP, disconnected media drive, open project, ‘general error’…..

[Saya Hillman]

I may be missing something but….

The problem is that the project doesn’t open at all. I double click on the project file and then General Error comes up — I can’t even get to the “files are offline” screen. I don’t see any of my bins, sequences, clips, etc. The browser/timeline/viewer remain the generic, blank gray clean slates.

I thought I was going to:
1. open new project
2. import files a few at a time
3. locate corrupt file (still not sure how I’ll know it’s corrupt if I can’t even reconnect files?)
4. recapture corrupt one

[Saya Hillman]

Makes sense, thanks —

Didn’t have any render files yet, audio or video, as I was just at the importing and organizing stage, so will start what Don suggested.

One question though — how will I know that a file is corrupt? I import a few at a time, until I get to one that what, won’t open? Gives an error message?

Also, would it make sense to start importing backwards, meaning the most recent files first, thinking that something I did in the past few days as opposed to a month ago is the culprit?

Will definitely keep you posted, thank you thank you thank you

[Saya Hillman]

Ok, hope this works!

https://www.geocities.com/hillmasa/index.html?1142879297381

[Saya Hillman]

It’s FCP4.

I don’t see a .txt, and tried adding .fcp, but it still opens as a text file.

I was trying to figure out where to upload the file — I have a limited number of pages with my hosting company, and all are part of my public website. I tried geocities since it’s free, but you can only upload 5MB, and the project is 11MB.

Do you know of any quick/free/easy sites I can upload to?

[Saya Hillman]

I actually just remembered a file from early on in the project that I saved on another HD — that one at least starts the “Reading Project” process, but once it gets to 6%, General Error comes up again. The ones on my 160GB don’t even start the reading project process.

I opened a new project and imported 5 of the files I was using in the old project, they work fine.

[Saya Hillman]

Well, I certainly learned my lesson and won’t be save as-ing again!

Yep, FPC was quit when I ran rescue.

FCP4
11.8 MB

Even my autosave vault files, which are named the name pre-save as, won’t open. Same General Error.

Excuse my novice-ness re. posting – I went to my cPanel, and uploaded the file into my public html folder, planning on giving you the web address. But the file becomes a data/binary file when I do that, opening Excel when downloaded. What am I doing wrong?

(I really appreciate all your help Jeremy!)

[Saya Hillman]

Ok, copy is on desktop.

Ownership & Permissions had Read & Write selected already.

When I first started using FCP and was just looking for tips on how to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen, someone on a forum said that doing a “save as” and changing the name every once in awhile would ensure that if my file got corrupted, I wouldn’t be saving it over and over.