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FCPX Will Not Open

L

LouiTheFish

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 28, 2009
29
0
Hi there,
I have Final Cut Pro X, updated to 10.0.8 and have been having issues for about a week now. FCPX has been working great until last week when it started to crash immediately upon clicking the icon in the dock and returning an error report (it's enormous and I have no idea what it says). After a few days of this, I uninstalled everything, trashed my prefs and caches, and started over. Now it does the same thing even after all the installs and restarts.

Here's the tricky part: This ONLY happens when I have my external hard drives plugged in. I have two 2TB G-Tech G-Drives that I work off of and a 1TB LaCie Rugged that shuttles footage for me. When the drives aren't mounted, FCPX works like a charm.

Any ideas?
 
F

floh

macrumors 6502
Nov 28, 2011
460
2
Stuttgart, Germany
LouiTheFish said:
Hi there,
I have Final Cut Pro X, updated to 10.0.8 and have been having issues for about a week now. FCPX has been working great until last week when it started to crash immediately upon clicking the icon in the dock and returning an error report (it's enormous and I have no idea what it says). After a few days of this, I uninstalled everything, trashed my prefs and caches, and started over. Now it does the same thing even after all the installs and restarts.

Here's the tricky part: This ONLY happens when I have my external hard drives plugged in. I have two 2TB G-Tech G-Drives that I work off of and a 1TB LaCie Rugged that shuttles footage for me. When the drives aren't mounted, FCPX works like a charm.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

One of your projects on the external drive seems broken. So broken that trying to load it makes FCPX crash. The easiest way to see which one it is would be to use Event Manager X.

But it seems to cost 5 bucks now and you can do the same things manually if you don't want to spend the money. It's a helpful tool though.

Just do the following: On your external hard drive, move all project folder located in "Final Cut Projects" in the root directory to a different temporary location on the drive (e.g. "Final Cut Projects Backup"). Start FCPX, I hope this will work. Then quit, move one project back to the original folder and try to start again. That way, you will quickly figure out which project is the broken one.

Trying to repair the project could be tough, but that way, you can at least start FCPX up again, if you just keep said project in the backup folder.
 
M

mBox

macrumors 68020
Jun 26, 2002
2,357
84
Do you have space on another drive?
How about the internal?
At times you can see which Project/Event is killing your system.
Itll stop as it loads the lists.
However this doesnt happen all the time.
You can also run Disk Utility on that external and see if helps.
 
L

LouiTheFish

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 28, 2009
29
0
Thanks for the responses. I can use my shuttle drive but id much rather use the dedicated GTech as it never moves and basically serves no other purpose. I tested it out and with only the shuttle drive mounted (separate from my usual daisy chain through my GTechs), I was able to run FCPX.

My theory is now this: FCPX doesn't like to work with Time Machine backup drives. While the drive I use for editing has never been a TM backup, it does (as of recently) contain files that once shared disk space with a TM backup. The files weren't part of the backup itself but lived on an adjacent partition to my regular TM backup. What do you think the likelihood is that this is affecting functionality?
 
F

floh

macrumors 6502
Nov 28, 2011
460
2
Stuttgart, Germany
LouiTheFish said:
My theory is now this: FCPX doesn't like to work with Time Machine backup drives. While the drive I use for editing has never been a TM backup, it does (as of recently) contain files that once shared disk space with a TM backup. The files weren't part of the backup itself but lived on an adjacent partition to my regular TM backup. What do you think the likelihood is that this is affecting functionality?
Click to expand...

Now, I haven't programmed FCPX myself, but I'd say the likelihood is very tiny. Even if (and that is not really possible, even on MacOS Journaled Filesystems, and would be an accident/bug) the files were somehow affected by the backup on the same drive, I would expect FCPX to just look on every drive for its specifically named folders and ignore the rest.

The only catch I can think of: If FCPX finds a Mac OS installation on a drive (like your system drive), it will also start to look for the "$HOME/Movies/Final Cut *" folders. If a TM backup is recognized as "containing a Mac OS X installation" then FCPX might start to go crazy, since the backupdb of TM is a weird combination of real files, diff files, and symbolic links. When I get home today, I can (just for fun) start up FCPX with my TM backup drive attached to test things. But I doubt it will be a problem.

Much more likely is that one important file (such as a project file) got messed up when you moved things around over partitions/drives. Hard drives are (sadly) far from perfect, and if you are out of luck, they ruined one of your projects in a very bad way.

Good luck!
 
M

mBox

macrumors 68020
Jun 26, 2002
2,357
84
Ive had lost events and broken projects in the past.
if the project is still intact and can be opened then just re-import the events.
they will re-link.
if the project is buggered up then that Im not sure off.
has never happened to me and Ive logged thousands of hours on FCPX since June 2011.
 
L

LouiTheFish

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 28, 2009
29
0
floh said:
Now, I haven't programmed FCPX myself, but I'd say the likelihood is very tiny. Even if (and that is not really possible, even on MacOS Journaled Filesystems, and would be an accident/bug) the files were somehow affected by the backup on the same drive, I would expect FCPX to just look on every drive for its specifically named folders and ignore the rest.

The only catch I can think of: If FCPX finds a Mac OS installation on a drive (like your system drive), it will also start to look for the "$HOME/Movies/Final Cut *" folders. If a TM backup is recognized as "containing a Mac OS X installation" then FCPX might start to go crazy, since the backupdb of TM is a weird combination of real files, diff files, and symbolic links. When I get home today, I can (just for fun) start up FCPX with my TM backup drive attached to test things. But I doubt it will be a problem.

Much more likely is that one important file (such as a project file) got messed up when you moved things around over partitions/drives. Hard drives are (sadly) far from perfect, and if you are out of luck, they ruined one of your projects in a very bad way.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

This could be true and is similar to what I was thinking, that maybe something got pulled along with the data transfer. I'm going to try to take some time this weekend to pull everything off and re-add it file by file till I find the general area of the problem.

mBox said:
Ive had lost events and broken projects in the past.
if the project is still intact and can be opened then just re-import the events.
they will re-link.
if the project is buggered up then that Im not sure off.
has never happened to me and Ive logged thousands of hours on FCPX since June 2011.
Click to expand...

I appreciate the response but there's no indication that a particular project is causing this issue. Like I said, the variable of whether or not this actually works is whether this hard drive is plugged in.
 
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