General error message upon launching sequence

Hi,
I have been editing my half-hour documentary on Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 using a 500GB external harddrive. About a month ago that harddrive died completely and I had to spend quite a bit of money and time retrieving the files from the drive. (Learn from others' misstakes: the excuse that I couldn't afford a second external drive for back-up ironically cost me a lot of money and in the end I had to buy two new harddrives for file-retrieval not to mention other costs). Eventually a 'harddrive-surgeon' managed to rescue all the files and put the entire project folder on a new 500GB harddrive.

So, to the current problem... when I open my project from the new harddrive it opens up fine and everything looks normal. However once the project is open and I try to launch my main sequence where most of the edit is, it refuses to open and I get the following messages coming up: First - 'General Error (34)', Second message: 'Error: Out of memory'...
Does anyone have a clue what this could mean and what I could do to open up that edit sequence???
Will be forever grateful if you can help me!!!
Cheers!

How much space do you have available on ALL of your drives, including all internals, especially the system drive? Error -34 means "disk full" according to my resources, and "out of memory" in this context can mean the same thing.

Scott

System drive has 4GB left and the external 160GB. Do you think I have to free up more space on the system drive?

I just freed up space on the system drive and now have 12GB available there but the same error appears after re-launching the FC project. How much space could I possibly need? Everything is pointing to the external drive in the preferences and in terms of RAM I have 2GB...

>>Do you think I have to free up more space on the system drive?

Oh, yes! 4 GB used to be a huge amount of real estate, but in the video world it's a postage stamp. Especially on the system drive. The rule of thumb is to have at least 10% free space on all connected drives, regardless of what they're used for, but I would amend that to say that 10 GB is the minimum space you should have on your system drive if it is smaller than 100 GB.

Scott

You may have a corrupted project, clip or sequence. It's not hard to imagine that at least one of your recovered media files wasn't fully recovered and is giving you trouble. I would suggest copying your bad sequence and pasting it into a new one, but that's hard to do if you can't open it in the first place. Others have lots of good advice on recovering corrupted projects and I hope they'll chime in .

Scott

Often times trashing your preferences will solve a General error

Michael Horton
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Thanks. I've heard that somewhere... but how do you do that?
x

Check the FAQ under Troubleshooting

Michael Horton
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>>but how do you do that?

Oh, stasianna, you walked right into this one. The little FAQ pony is on every page, and for the last week or so she has said....

Click on her (not this image, the one at the upper left of the page) and you will find your answer. Along with a bunch of other good ones.

Scott

Ooooooops. Classic :-)
Tried the pref.... still getting that lovely 'general error' message.
(oh, how I should have bought that extra harddrive...)

Some third party audio plugins will cause General errors. So will applying speed changes to clips over 15 minutes long. Cant remember what else.

Michael Horton
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Oh, and a / character in clip names. Big no no.

Michael Horton
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I'm still suspicious of damage done to files when the disk crashed, or even damage done to render files due to the system drive getting too full. You could dump all your render files and see if anything changes, without losing anything but time. Some may be on your scratch drive, some on your system drive, depending on your diligence when setting up and working on the project.

Scott

Hi,

My FCP 5.1 keep crashing upon launching. It was working fine a few days ago, but I since deleted a bunch of files to free up space and bought a new external hard drive and partitioned it and possibly downloaded some plug in.

I have read the FAQ and other instructions on this forum and still can't figure it out.

It is not a problem in the Library/Quicktime, since I don't have non Apple plug ins there.

what else could I try?

thanks