Final Cut Pro X deletes entire projects

[Surf Boy from Barcelona]

Hi Guys,
Just about to buy FCPX for my MacBook but just seen my favourite vlogger saying the FCPX has deleted his entire project when rendering / exporting around 15 times.

Has anybody experienced this as it sounds terrifying for someone who has a large project?

Now i'm too worried to invest in FCPX.

The video starts at 1.22

Thank you

 

[ColdCase]

The project may not be erased, just the drive corrupted or near their capacity limit. In the past I've seen this happen with flakey hard drives. Scary but recoverable. Dunno what kind of hardware setup they have. I don't think flakey hardware is only an FCPX issue, but there are many others here with more experience on large projects.

 

[Surf Boy from Barcelona]

The project may not be erased, just the drive corrupted or near their capacity limit. In the past I've seen this happen with flakey hard drives. Scary but recoverable. Dunno what kind of hardware setup they have. I don't think flakey hardware is only an FCPX issue, but there are many others here with more experience on large projects.

Hi Coldcase,
Thank you for your input! Both are using 2015 MBP 15" models with 512GB.

 

[Heruhur]

So one guy has a problem with final cut pro and that's the whole base of your doubts?

Man, as with any computer program and computers as a whole.:
Backup, backup, backup.

Everything can fail at some point, the problem you see in the video, have you seen more people with that problem?
Or is it just this guy.

There are loads of people encountering problems in fcpx and loads of people who do not have any issues with it.

Buy what you need when you need it.

 

[ColdCase]

Hi Coldcase,
Thank you for your input! Both are using 2015 MBP 15" models with 512GB.

Any external drives? What kind of backup are they doing? Are they doing 4K video? 512GB isn't much, weird things seem to happen when trying to exceed memory capacity especially if there are a couple programs saving data. But I've never lost an entire project, although I've had to recover a few.

 

[Surf Boy from Barcelona]

So one guy has a problem with final cut pro and that's the whole base of your doubts?

Man, as with any computer program and computers as a whole.:
Backup, backup, backup.

Everything can fail at some point, the problem you see in the video, have you seen more people with that problem?
Or is it just this guy.

There are loads of people encountering problems in fcpx and loads of people who do not have any issues with it.

Buy what you need when you need it.

Fair point but this guy is making videos for a living and doing it daily. His girlfriend has the same problem too. If it's a serious bug then Apple need to address it. I was merely pointing it out as this is a professional application and the fact that he said that it's happened 15 times recently to both of them is worrying. Plus I take my time when I buy something and at £300, I want it to work reliably otherwise i'd get rid of it.
I can't comment on whether anyone else has had the problem as I don't know anyone who uses FCPX - a few friends use Premiere and are loyal to it but I was keen on FCPX being an Apple product.
Only Apple software problem I have had (apart from iTunes duplicating films & deleting tracks from playlists) was the last version of iPhoto before Photos when randomly, iPhoto would shade out half of a photo and render the file useless - touch wood, no problems since photos!
[doublepost=1499610611][/doublepost]

Any external drives? What kind of backup are they doing? Are they doing 4K video? 512GB isn't much, weird things seem to happen when trying to exceed memory capacity especially if there are a couple programs saving data. But I've never lost an entire project, although I've had to recover a few.

1080p video 30fps. Thank you for your input buddy. Much appreciated

 

[joema2]

Fair point but this guy is making videos for a living and doing it daily. His girlfriend has the same problem too. If it's a serious bug then Apple need to address it. I was merely pointing it out as this is a professional application and the fact that he said that it's happened 15 times recently to both of them is worrying....

I'm a professional documentary editor and often use FCPX 10 hours a day. I have about 64 terabytes of Thunderbolt RAID arrays on my 2015 iMac 27 holding many different projects. I am currently working on a documentary which has about 10 terabytes in a single library and will eventually have 20 terabytes.

I have never experienced FCPX deleting a project, whether during rendering or any other time. No other professional FCPX editor I know has experienced this and I've never heard anyone else even mention it on a forum. What the vlogger said about you can't back up manually is incorrect. Below a tutorial about how to do this.

Anyone who uses video editing software professionally knows it is all imperfect. I used Premiere for years and periodically had problems with it crashing repeatedly. Likewise I've had FCPX crash many times, but it's never deleted data or projects. In rare cases I've had to step back to a previous auto-saved project which FCPX makes by itself. At most this cost me a few minutes of work. If I have the slightest concern I will manually make a project snapshot (see below video) but this is virtually never needed. You need it more to safeguard against an editing mistake. In general both Premiere and FCPX are stable but you can encounter situations where they are unstable.

The vlogger may have some kind of system problem such as nearly full hard drive or corrupt media. If FCPX deleted projects all the time, why would anyone use it? There are over two million people using FCPX worldwide. It would be impossible for that huge user base (including many full time professional editors) to be unaware of FCPX deleting projects left and right.

MacBreak Studio - Faster manual saving of project snapshots in FCPX:

 

[MSastre]

I'm a professional documentary editor and often use FCPX 10 hours a day. I have about 64 terabytes of Thunderbolt RAID arrays on my 2015 iMac 27 holding many different projects. I am currently working on a documentary which has about 10 terabytes in a single library and will eventually have 20 terabytes.

I have never experienced FCPX deleting a project, whether during rendering or any other time. No other professional FCPX editor I know has experienced this and I've never heard anyone else even mention it on a forum. What the vlogger said about you can't back up manually is incorrect. Below a tutorial about how to do this.

Anyone who uses video editing software professionally knows it is all imperfect. I used Premiere for years and periodically had problems with it crashing repeatedly. Likewise I've had FCPX crash many times, but it's never deleted data or projects. In rare cases I've had to step back to a previous auto-saved project which FCPX makes by itself. At most this cost me a few minutes of work. If I have the slightest concern I will manually make a project snapshot (see below video) but this is virtually never needed. You need it more to safeguard against an editing mistake. In general both Premiere and FCPX are stable but you can encounter situations where they are unstable.

The vlogger may have some kind of system problem such as nearly full hard drive or corrupt media. If FCPX deleted projects all the time, why would anyone use it? There are over two million people using FCPX worldwide. It would be impossible for that huge user base (including many full time professional editors) to be unaware of FCPX deleting projects left and right.

MacBreak Studio - Faster manual saving of project snapshots in FCPX:

I have to agree. Too many people are using FCPX without experiencing any similar problems. If you use external hard drives, manage your Libraries and media properly, and keep enough free space on your drives, you should have no major problems.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

If such a thing was happening to me, regardless of the application, I wouldn't have let it occur 15 times or more, I'd have done some serious troubleshooting, given Apple a call, asked for help on an internet forum... But hey, if you're a video blogger with a following, a public rant is also an option. Maybe someone from Apple will respond to the negative publicity and fix his problem for him.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result. Whenever someone says that a piece of software or equipment, "just decided" to do something bad, I lose any faith in their ability to logically troubleshoot the issue they're having. Oh, beware the malevolent, sentient machine!!

To me, it suggests they have no concept of causality and/or have dismissed the possibility that operator error could be a contributing factor.

The fellow is demanding that he be able to Save when he wants, rather than autosave. Hopefully, he means that he can supplementally Save, over and above autosave. The failure to manually Save has likely been responsible for far more data loss than autosave ever has. The Mac is constantly auto-saving - the design goal is to recover from any system crash with minimal or no data loss.

However, if the machine is nearly out of storage, autosave may not work as intended (and manually saving would likely encounter the same problem, since the file size doesn't change based on how you save it). Of course, he ought to be getting out-of-space notifications. We don't know whether that's been happening, but if it has been happening, he wouldn't be the first user I've encountered who couldn't (or wouldn't) correlate an out-of-space warning to subsequent problems.

 

[joema2]

...The fellow is demanding that he be able to Save when he wants, rather than autosave. Hopefully, he means that he can supplementally Save, over and above autosave. The failure to manually Save has likely been responsible for far more data loss than autosave ever has...

As I described above, you can easily do a manual save of your project.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

As I described above, you can easily do a manual save of your project.

Yep. I was just addressing the vlogger's "demands," not reality.

 

[martinX]

Even without doing a manual save, FCPX makes backups of libraries. To retrieve a backup its as simple as File > Open Library > From Backup... and away you go.

Also, I googled "Final Cut Pro X deletes entire projects" and got nothing in the first four pages. Hope he gets his problem fixed, but it doesn't sound like a common problem at all.

 

[MSastre]

If such a thing was happening to me, regardless of the application, I wouldn't have let it occur 15 times or more, I'd have done some serious troubleshooting, given Apple a call, asked for help on an internet forum... But hey, if you're a video blogger with a following, a public rant is also an option. Maybe someone from Apple will respond to the negative publicity and fix his problem for him.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result. Whenever someone says that a piece of software or equipment, "just decided" to do something bad, I lose any faith in their ability to logically troubleshoot the issue they're having. Oh, beware the malevolent, sentient machine!!

To me, it suggests they have no concept of causality and/or have dismissed the possibility that operator error could be a contributing factor.

The fellow is demanding that he be able to Save when he wants, rather than autosave. Hopefully, he means that he can supplementally Save, over and above autosave. The failure to manually Save has likely been responsible for far more data loss than autosave ever has. The Mac is constantly auto-saving - the design goal is to recover from any system crash with minimal or no data loss.

However, if the machine is nearly out of storage, autosave may not work as intended (and manually saving would likely encounter the same problem, since the file size doesn't change based on how you save it). Of course, he ought to be getting out-of-space notifications. We don't know whether that's been happening, but if it has been happening, he wouldn't be the first user I'.ve encountered who couldn't (or wouldn't) correlate an out-of-space warning to subsequent problems.

Pretty sure ApfelKuchen nailed it with "it suggests they have no concept of causality and/or have dismissed the possibility that operator error could be a contributing factor". No worries about investing in FCPX, and there are plenty of resources for learning how to use the program properly. Some excellent training videos can be found at Ripple Training.

 

[ColdCase]

Of course, he ought to be getting out-of-space notifications. We don't know whether that's been happening, but if it has been happening, he wouldn't be the first user I've encountered who couldn't (or wouldn't) correlate an out-of-space warning to subsequent problems.

Just a nit, I sometimes push capacity limits with one or two programs saving (transcoding usually) to a fast SSD at the same time, and there is no obvious warning when capacity is exceeded.

Some apps will open up multiple threads, each with their own write processes. When I'm not carefully managing the storage, one thread or another runs out of storage capacity and things stop in a hurry. I usually first notice it when I open a results file, and the file cannot be opened because its corrupted. My first thought is, damn, I'm out of storage. Thats what may be happening with the blogger, the project will look as if it has disappeared and he hasn't learned how to recover. Been there done that..... with FCPX, Compressor, Handbrake, Bigasoft ProRes converter... they all seem to do the same thing, at least in my work flow.