17 hours of rendering gone in a flash

So I've got this long show with color correction and a noise reduction filter.
17 hours of rendering.

Last night I left at 12:30 am and everything was good.

Come in this morning at 7:00am, fire up the system and nearly all the rendered files are gone.

How can I match back to the rendered files? A few are still there but I can't figure out how to match back to which file is which so that I can see if the other rendered files are still there somewhere or just went away.?

Second time in a week this has gone up.

There's no way to use the render files created because your project file was never saved. It doesn't remember the renders.

I've always advised that you let no render go more than 30 minutes. Always hit "Cancel" and save your project file, then resume the render. Because if the computer crashes during the render, you lose everything. Cancelling the render and saving the project -- not only does that not lengthen the overall rendering time (except the 15 seconds it takes to stop and save), but it saves the project file's links to the render files already created. Basically, it preserves what you've just rendered.

Read the old thread:

[www.lafcpug.org]


www.derekmok.com

Actually, the project WAS saved.

The rendering had been done overnight during the two previous nights. Last night we added a few lower 3rd graphics and rendered those. Ironically, the rendered graphic sections were still there this morning. Most of the rest was gone.

This is FCS2 BTW

EDIT:
I read the other thread. It is not a bad drive. Only rendered files are being lost. The original captured media is on the same drive and nothing is being lost there.

Looking back at my first post I see how I wasn't clear about the rendering having occurred and the project saved about 24 hours prior to the loss. Last night we were making some final touch ups. It was late and the show length is nearly two hours so we decided to come back in the morning to do the final output to tape. Upon startup this morning the problem occurred.

Oddly, when we first played the sequence it stuttered along but we couldn't figure it out because the sequence indicated all the media was rendered. Then after a couple minutes, the colored render bar showed up.

This will cause us to miss the deadline.
It's not a broadcast piece and no one's gonna have a meltdown over it. But the client has been used to Avid and this kind of thing has never been a problem on their prior Avid projects.
So it's mostly just embarrassing for us, since we suggested going this route in the first place and could have just as easily gone the other way.

Try your auto-save vault.

Open a project from late last night when the renders were there and see if it reconnects properly then. Then you just have to re-add your l3rds which will probably take a lot less than 17hrs

Okay, so you saved and powered down after the 17-hour render was completed.

There have been reports of FCP6 losing render files more easily than FCP5. I haven't encountered this myself, but then again, I've only used FCP6 on one system on about three projects and so my first-hand experience is limited. You already tried Reconnect Media? Render files are a real b*tch to reconnect, but it's worth a shot. It's a Hail Mary pass as far as I know, though.

What I might think about, then, is that you should do self-contained full-quality movie exports. Once everything was rendered and Audio Mixdown performed, export the movie file so that all this work is preserved in a simple plug-and-play file that contains all your effects without any more need for rendering. Doing a tape output from an effects-heavy, render-file-saturated timeline is problematic, anyway. If you now have to micromanage your time, you might even consider splitting the project up into sections, render small chunks at a time and do the movie-file export.

> It is not a bad drive. Only rendered files are being lost. The original captured media is on the
> same drive and nothing is being lost there.

I wouldn't be so quick to rule that out yet. A bad drive doesn't necessarily lose everything in a pinch -- in fact, it's quite common for early symptoms to be stuttering, inability to run as fast as it's supposed to, and loss or corruption of partial files. Did you run Disk First Aid and DiskWarrior? Was the drive properly formatted? How full is it? What kind?

Render files are being modified, discarded and created all the time, so it's also not uncommon for them to be the first to disappear when a drive starts going wonky. I can't say if it's the definitive cause of your problem, but it's on the list.


www.derekmok.com

OK, tried Scott's suggestion. Pulled up the last couple saves from the vault. At first I was elated as there was no colored render bar. But then when I play it it just stutters along. In the meantime, I have started the rendering again and when I stop it the newly rendered sections play fine.

Drive is a pair of Seagate 500g SATA3 drives striped in a Firmtek enclosure. Sata connection to the computer. Drive is about 1/3 full. Project is standard def.

OK, well i have had FCP projects go sour on me and lose links to my media and renders so thats why i suggest autosave. However, it sounds like you got more issues going on like what Derek is saying.

I would suggest a blend of Dereks and my suggestions, how bout trying to export part of the autosave project that contains a color-free render bar, hopefully your old renders. All you've mentioned so far is playback issues, maybe try and get a self-contained QT out of it with the old renders that you can playback from, then add any l3rds as necessary.

Just a few minute test section, if it takes forever, its trying to re-render for export and the idea failed. If it blazes through, you should be in business...

OK, tried Scott's suggestion and opened an old save. Sequence shows nothing needs to be rendered, no color bars of any kind. Skips on playback. Went to export to Quicktime. The export is taking about as long as it would take to render from scratch so looks like I am completely screwed.
Don't see any other choice but to re-render everything and put it out to tape immediately.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. Sounds like you don't have time for troubleshooting...and can't risk it. Get the show out to tape as quickly as possible, wrap the project and then go hunting. You said the export would take as long as the render -- 17 hours? There is no way even a two-hour feature would take 17 hours to export to a QuickTime movie without conversion if your effects have been rendered. There's a time bomb somewhere in your system, gotta find it when you have the chance. Did you check all drives connected to the system for formatting and free space?


www.derekmok.com

None of the drives, external or internal, are close to full. I think the only thing to do is to just get the show out to tape if I can and possibly do a complete system install after. I don't trust this install of FCS nor what it might have done to the system.

Never had problems like this before FCS2 was installed.

Did you do a 'save as' of the project? When you save as you link the render files to one of the copies. Generally it is the newest copy, so if you 'save as' and then throw that copy on another drive for safe keeping, you unlink all the render files from your current working project.

As for the current problem, go into your render settings and make sure 'full' is ticked - so Sequence > Render All > tick 'Full'. Then select Sequence > Render all > Both. It seems as if the latest version is having some display glitches - I had something similar last week. It says no render required but won't display correctly. Doing a full render fixes it, and is a lot quicker than a standard render

Jude, thanks for that information. I did not do a "save as" but the information is very good to know for the future.

I think this is a bad install and I need to start a completely fresh system in order to isolate the problem. I don't think it's just "losing track" or unlinking from the rendered media. I believe it's destroying the media completely.

I had a similar problem with Color a couple weeks ago and left a post in the Color forum but got no response. In that case I watched Color render for several hours and then shortly after the render was done and sent to FCP, the rendered media completely disappeared from the directory structure Color creates when it renders. The folders were all there, the media just vanished. This happened three time across different drives. My temporary solution was to lock the folders containing the rendered media as soon as the render finished. That got me through.

At the time I figured Color was to blame but now I am thinking this is FCP. Only rendered media is vanishing. No problems with any captured footage or any graphic renders done in After Effects, Photoshop, etc. Only FCP managed rendered media.

It's unfortunate because I would like to move this client from Avid over to FCP. Color seemed to be the app that finally would do it. But this situation isn't working.

This is much like a problem we Lightwave users had a couple of years ago. There was a bug that became known as the "Zero K" bug. Lightwave would crash out for no obvious reason and the main project file, a LW "scene file" would be destroyed. The file was there but showed "Zero K" for file size and would not open. That led to careful and frequent manual incremental saves to cover you buttisimo. Not everyone got the problem. But for those who got it, the thing was devastating.

My stomach is churning now about starting any new projects in FC.