Operation not Allowed -- WTF?!

Ok this is really strange...

Contract work, at home on my G5, start getting problems where the Canvas turns red, says close and reopen to re-enable functionality, so i do and then i can't reopen the sequence! It says Operation Not Allowed, i click through, and it says Out of Memory.

Now this is an old machine but all the drives have plenty of headroom, i safe boot, repair permissions, trash preferences, etc, seems to have fixed things, its at least stable for the rest of the night.

Fired the project up on my office MacPro, Octo with 8GBs ram, i duplicate a sequence to start a new piece, 2 mins later DOES THE SAME THING! I bought the argument that my 1.8ghz G5 cant handle it but this machine most definitely can. All my drives have plenty of room, im know the machines legit. Im pissed...

So i try the other sequences and they work fine. I start over, things work fine until 10 mins later after i laid everything out, Canvas goes red, cant open the sequence, etc...

So i figure its gotta be the Sequence itself because everything else in the project and other projects work. Copying to another project doesn't help. I export to XML and re-import in a new project...same error.

The best i can do is find a working sequence in my autosaves, and drag to my new project, and cross my fingers it doesnt happen again too soon. Needless to say my autosave frequency has gone waaay up.

Anyway, this is me venting and hoping someone's had this same problem as well...

OK, it pretty much happened instantly again, the moment i turned a clip offline...this time i got a snapshot...oh both machines on 6.0.2, leopard at home, Tiger on the MacPro

Have you got any graphics in the bad sequence? Are they CMYK or greyscale? This can cause these kind of problems.

Or - could it be that one piece of media is corrupt and causing issues?

No, no stills in this one but i did just get a new graphics package from them since they updated this show since i last cut for them. But its all video, NTSC and a few Animation clips, all SD. Perhaps the transfer process corrupted something?

Im just pissed that its messing up one sequence at a time while the others still work...

perhaps i'll take all the clips the gave me and re-encode them in Compressor. Make new clean copies of everything and see if i can isolate it to the transfered media...

I've only seen this on big projects (project file size wise)... And it's usually a big red warning light to reduce project file size. Check your scratch clips. Any OS/FCP/QT updates recently?

No, these are fairly small projects, just short studio stuff cut down into two or three segments.

I did just upgrade to 6.0.2 on my home machine since the network just did as well but my macpro has been on 6.0.2 for a while.

Anyway, back on my G5 last night things seemed to go smoothly, tho i saved like a maniac. Still not sure what the issue if but for now im crossing my fingers

I am on a MacPro Quad 2.66 with 5 GB RAM running 10.4.11 and this just happened to me on a project. I have over 400GB free on the internal storage drive I am using.

I was working along just fine and was putting a dip to color transition between a .psd (RGB) I was using as a background for a text screen and a SD video clip. Then I got the same red image on the canvas. I also got the exact same errors as Scott when I tried to re-open the sequence. Trashed prefs, opened other projects/sequences with success but the problematic sequence would not open.

The sequence I am working on is only 5 and a half minutes long but it is packed with Motion text files and a few Motion graphic files.

Then for whatever reason ( as I was typing this post) I double clicked the .psd from the file browser in FCP and it opened the timeline and canvas back up. Then I double clicked the problematic sequence from the browser in FCP and it opened fine! I have never had this happen before and I hope it doesn't happen again! I nearly peed myself!

Weird.