FCP into LiveType = media offline and gone forever.

Hi everybody. I'm hoping someone can shed some light on what just happened to me.

I'm running FCP4.5 on a 1.8 dual G5 with 1.5 gigs of RAM, 2 internal hard drives and a 300 gig external. All my Final Cut files are on the external drive.

I cut my source, a single one-hour tape, down to seventeen minutes. I finished the edit and opened LiveType for the first time to do titles. (Usually I use Photoshop but thought I'd give LiveType a try). Everything was working fine -- edit was done, titles appeared in the timeline. I saved a new version of my project file and shut the computer down for the night. When I opened the file the next morning, the media offline dialogue box came up listing all of my missing cache and render files, and the timeline was intact but red. I tried to reconnect them and they couldn't be found except for two insignificant clips. I did a finder search for them and they were nowhere. I noticed that my external drive had seven more free gigs than it had the night before. I ran a data rescue program and it found nothing. My trash was empty.

So the files are just gone. I found one other instance of what I think is a LiveType/FCP/file delete connection in a forum, but no theories as to why it happened. Has this happened to anybody else here? What can I do to avoid it in the future?

And because I have a "convoluted workflow" and always use capture now, I guess I can't easily batch recapture my footage from my single tape since it's un-highlighted and unavailable in the menu. I didn't realize capture now was a bad idea until today.

Any help would be great -- it'd be terrible if this happened again on a bigger project.

jennie

Oh boy that is awful. I hear about stuff like this happening but am still not sure why? Was your HD pretty full? Is it pretty full now?

Not absolutely sure, but I think the LiveType connection could be coincidental. It's more likely that your drive wasn't in a healthy state, or a file corruption happened at the beginning of your session..

There are two safeguards against media corruption: An inscrutable batch list or backups of your media files. You must have at least one or the other on every single project, no exceptions.

It's awful, right? I hate not knowing what caused it so as to avoid it again. To answer your questions, my external hard drive with project files was pretty full. And I've heard the arguments for keeping at least 20% of your drive free, which I didn't have, but there was more than enough to work with. And I probably can't go along with the drive not being in a healthy state idea... it's worked really well on a number of other projects flawlessly, and the whole project was running smoothly with edits and transitions and everything until the introduction of LiveType. And if a file corruption happened at the beginning of the project, what might cause that? And would it allow me to work for two days without error but then explode when LiveType was used?

If anybody has any other ideas, no matter how wild you think they are, I'd like to hear them so I can try to rule things out. In the meantime I'll stop with the capture now and start doing it right.

Jennie

PS. Is there anything short of redigitizing and re-editing all my footage that I can do to salvage this project?

> And I probably can't go along with the drive not being in a healthy state
> idea... it's worked really well on a number of other projects flawlessly

That's no indicator that it didn't fail this time. I'd look at the drive and think about perhaps backing up the data and then reformatting the drive.

> everything until the introduction of LiveType. And if a file corruption
> happened at the beginning of the project, what might cause that? And
> would it allow me to work for two days without error but then explode when
> LiveType was used?

It's possible, since LiveType files are a little more complicated for FCP to deal with than normal clips. However, if your hardware/software combination can't handle LiveType files in Final Cut Pro, that would lead me to suspect there's something wrong in the combination to begin with. Most of us deal with much more complicated and processor-intensive tasks (eg. Multiclips, huge Photoshop files, motion graphics in multiple tracks, HD material) than LiveType objects, so if your system can't handle them, I think there's something wrong with your system.

> PS. Is there anything short of redigitizing and re-editing all my footage that I
> can do to salvage this project?

This will depend on whether the timecodes on your original clips were accurate. First thing's first, you should back up your project file. Then you should attempt to Batch Capture the clips. If they reconnect properly to form the edits you'd made, then you're out of the woods. However, since you had used Capture Now, there's a chance some of the clips will refuse to recapture automatically. In those cases, you can attempt to re-create the editing decisions based on the timecodes of the offline clips, which are preserved even though the image will read "Media Offline".

This has happened to me - and I'm pretty pedantic with my drives/media. It's definitley something to do with Livetype and FCP - I have a suspicion that it's to do with having both programs open at the same time, but no proof. I never use both open at the same time anymore, and I haven't had the problem since, so it's possible that either a. what I'm doing is working, or b. it's just random.

Perhaps it just hasn't happened to me yet...but I still think it's not just LiveType, but has something to do with the drives being used. Perhaps the interaction between FCP and LiveType projects triggers a corruption in the drive? I *do* notice that LiveType projects trigger unusual responses in the project file -- for example, the offline graphic is different, and LiveType projects imported into the timeline go offline much easier than anything else. I haven't lost media because of this, myself.

At any rate, I try not to use LiveType too often (because I find its effects to be a little repetitive, and I tend to keep my titles pretty simple). Ever since I started using Boris 3D, I haven't found too much of a need to use LiveType.

And I suppose you can always export a QuickTime movie with alpha channel from LiveType, bypass the problematic step? Time-consuming, but I always believed you save more time by going the safe route.

Pretty scary folks. This is the first I've ever heard of this. Does Motion ever act as wonky?



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I think you need to forget about the Live Type connection. In the past year, I have done over 50 projects with EXTENSIVE use of Live Type, which, by the way, is always open when FCP is open. The beauty of live type is that it is absolutely designed to work with FCP and the way I work..... compositing as I edit my sales videos (just to save time), having both aps open at the same time is essential.

I did, however, lose all of my media on an external firewire drive recently. I spent three days importing from about 38 hours of source tapes, and I do belive I know what happened..... I had gone beyond the 80% full capacity of my drive. I did begin my edit, and was able to rebuild from my existing timeline, but I had to go back and re-capture all of that footage.

It was a major pain!



Alan T

> I think you need to forget about the Live Type connection.

I'm going to disagree there. Eighty per cent full on a drive will almost certainly not result in the kind of media loss we're talking about. The LiveType issue is more likely. Just because you haven't encountered the media loss with LiveType for a year (which is very, very scant basis for a statistical analysis) doesn't mean it won't happen to somebody else. It hasn't happened to me, either, but I can say that in six years of using Final Cut Pro, I've never seen an 80-90 per cent full drive melt down, but I've seen plenty of cases of LiveType objects behaving strangely, even if it's never gone as far as data loss in my case.

[So the files are just gone. I found one other instance of what I think is a LiveType/FCP/file delete connection in a forum, but no theories as to why it happened. Has this happened to anybody else here? What can I do to avoid it in the future? ]

Yeah, happened to me too, last month, FCP 4.5 under panther 10.3.7. I used a media file as a background in LiveType to compose lower thirds. Next thing I knew, after the round trip, the media file was offline. And dead and gone. Had to recapture it from the offline clip. Must say I'm impressed with that first edition of LiveType for its media shredding ability. :-(

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