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Final Cut refuses to import, feels inclined to wreck budding professional life.

Kingsnapped

Kingsnapped

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 16, 2003
929
3
Los Angeles, CA
Whenever I try to import into final cut express, this happens.
(Cliffs notes: It tells me my HD (with 40 free gigs) is full, crashes system by dumping 40gigs of nothing in my capture scratch folder). I'm in the middle of a hugely important project, and have no other editing computers at my disposal. I can import clips through iMovie, but they are shot in 16:9, and I have to either resize or render everything, which is not an option. What do you suggest I do? Back up everything and Reinstall? Back up everything and reformat?? I have to have this beast finished within a week so I can start authoring the dvd before I leave on the 29th.

Any suggestions or prayers would be greatly appreciated.
 
back up. rewrite zero's over the entire hard drive (wipe it).

are you using a partition? you should really use an ENTIRELY SEPERATE disk for scratch, not a partition of the main drive.
 
NOW USE IT, haha

Will it capture to the External? If not, then wipe FCE, use the uninstaller, and also do a file search, to delete the prefs, etc. Every once in a while I'll have a capture hang in FCP, and i get a huge file that fills up almost the whole HD but iI just delete it and recapture, usually my fault when it fails capturing. Good luck.
 
BrianKonarsMac said:
back up. rewrite zero's over the entire hard drive (wipe it).

are you using a partition? you should really use an ENTIRELY SEPERATE disk for scratch, not a partition of the main drive.
Click to expand...

Well.. I do have all weekend with nowhere else to go to import stuff and move it over. Do you really think it's my HD, though? Like I said, iMovie had no problem.. and everything else is working great.

As for the seperate disc suggestions.. I wholeheartedly agree. As soon as I have the money, and my own home (I'm moving into dorms in a couple weeks), I'm getting the biggest, bad-ass system I can for editing. Until then though, it's just me and the powerbook.
 
Biker21098 said:
Will it capture to the External? If not, then wipe FCE, use the uninstaller, and also do a file search, to delete the prefs, etc. Every once in a while I'll have a capture hang in FCP, and i get a huge file that fills up almost the whole HD but iI just delete it and recapture, usually my fault when it fails capturing. Good luck.
Click to expand...

(should have refreshed before last reply :p)

I'll try to capture to the external in the morning. If it can't, and I erase all my FCE goodies.. will the project be safe and intact? I'd rather wait until monday and import at the high school than risk messing up this project.
 
it's not a bad disk since iMovie works, but probably a bad/corrupt install of FC. you can try uninstalling and reinstalling FC, but will more likely need to wipe the drive and start fresh (not an attractive solution, but the simplest and quickest).
 
Well, consider yourself lucky. FCE crashes on opening on my iMac. Anyways.

Uninstall EVERY LAST BIT of Final Cut that you can. Save the project files, if any, to your external disk. After you do this, repair the permissions.

Oh, and make sure that the external disk is HFS+ formatted.
Now, reinstall Final Cut. Set your capture scratch disk to the external one. See if you can import the clips. Now, this is assuming that you are using on-disk clips, right? If you are NOT, make sure that your camera is supported.

If all the above fails:
1. Pray to whatever god/gods you belive in.
2. Back up all files that you deem essential. Don't take programs, those can be reinstalled at least.
2w. You can dump them onto that external disk, I guess.
3. Wipe the disk.
4. Reinstall Final Cut.
5. Import clips
 
Mechcozmo said:
Oh, and make sure that the external disk is HFS+ formatted.
Click to expand...

The external disc I'm borrowing is from a Windows computer-repair dude. He said I can wipe any data on it, but I don't want to make it useless to him. Wouldn't I be safe just moving the currently imported (the bad ones are gone) files over?

I'll be at least reinstalling Final Cut for sure tomorrow. If it works, I'll be wiping the disc after the project. Expect another thread from me about what to back up to keep my computer as close to its current state as possible.
 
Mac OS X can reformat things as MS-DOS. He can still use it. If not, tell him to get a mac, lol.

That corrupt frame of yours sounds weird. I'll ask the Video Production teacher at my school monday if he knows anything.
(BTW, we had to edit on 700Mhz eMacs with 256MB of RAM. Some had 10.1, other 10.2 and others 10.3. Not fun, but the class was. Had more problems doing anything with those....)

Back on topic.

Try importing other video from a little bit before or after that bad frame of yours. Might allow you to get some stuff done. Can you watch the video on the camera (like in VCR/VTR mode?)
 
I think I have the answer to this problem, because the same thing happened to me. Are you using capture now to capture footage ? If so make sure that in Final Cut Express>System settings that limit capture now is checked on and set to something like 30 minutes. Apparently if you don't final cut tries to create a massive buffer file( because the capture length is undefined), which is why you hard disk fills up. Hope that fixes your problem.
 
James Craner said:
I think I have the answer to this problem, because the same thing happened to me. Are you using capture now to capture footage ? If so make sure that in Final Cut Express>System settings that limit capture now is checked on and set to something like 30 minutes. Apparently if you don't final cut tries to create a massive buffer file( because the capture length is undefined), which is why you hard disk fills up. Hope that fixes your problem.
Click to expand...

Oh my god, you are an effing genius.

I turned off the capture now limit last time I successfully imported... I didn't really see the point. I discovered yesterday that it's not one evil frame.. but any time I try to use capture now it does just that. What a great read to wake up to! I'm going to wake up and stuff and try it ASAP. If you're right as I think you are, 50 cool-points for you
 
James Craner said:
Thanks for you kind comments, glad I could help.
Click to expand...


Just came back (from the PC) to say you were exactly right and you are my new hero. If we had a point system here, I would give you half of mine. I set the Capture Now limit back down to 30 and jsut imported everything without a hitch! No reformat for me until Tiger.

Back to editing :D:D:D
 
Guess I spoke too soon. There are still "evil frames" happening. My first import went flawlessly, as did the capture part of the second. In the second import, my computer can not play through the video (in QT or FCE) witout crashifying. My guess is there's a bad hunk of hard drive that this is being written to. Would I be safe just reimporting that part, and not killing my disc until after the project?
 
Have you got Virex 7.5 installed per chance, although Apple never said why they pulled it, I discovered that it screws up FCE. If you open up the disk image for the installation file, there is a batch file to uninstall as you can't remove this program just by dragging to the trash.
 
James Craner said:
Have you got Virex 7.5 installed per chance, although Apple never said why they pulled it, I discovered that it screws up FCE. If you open up the disk image for the installation file, there is a batch file to uninstall as you can't remove this program just by dragging to the trash.
Click to expand...

No Virex. Just sketchy importing.

I re-imported the "evil" clip and everything went fine. I went to re-import another section of that clip and it's frozen on "waiting for timecode" (everything is plugged in and running). Ugg... I'm making progress but it's fusterating as hell.
 
Sucks. Just plain sucks.

If you drag the clips you have already imported to the external drive, you might get away with the bad hard drive sectors you possibly have.

Try starting off the OS disk that came with your computer, or whatever upgrade install disk. At the installer screen, go to the Installer menu and select Disk Utility (or something like that...) and run the Verify/Repair Disk check. That might pick up something...also check the permissions, if you havn't done that already.

If you still have trouble, start up in Single-User mode. Hold down Command+S on startup (gotta do it as soon as it starts up, and keep holding it until you see something that dosn't look like a normal Mac startup screen. Then let go. At the promt, enter: "fsck -yf" to check everything. (Do it without the quotes, though) FSCK stands for "File System Check" and the -yf stands for "Yes to all questions, Check everything even if marked good." Its like a souped-up version of the Disk Utility check. Once it is done (on my iMac it took it 3+ hours) type "reboot" (again, no quotes).

DO NOT HAVE THE EXTERNAL DRIVE MOUNTED Seeing as it is a FAT32 or NTFS or something NOT macintosh-standard, you can severly damnage the file system by running fsck on it. All the files can become unreadable. I read somewhere that you are supposed to do this with only keyboard and mouse connected, but not sure. Just make sure that the disk is unplugged before you start up, else it will be auto detected and I do not know the commands to eject the drive.
 
My friend had similar problems with FCP, and a rebuild with Diskwarrior 3. There were apparently a ton of directory problems, and one - or some - were messing things up.
 
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