Weird FCP black screen - finally solved

I had a very peculiar thing happen in FCP 5.1.4 yesterday, and I was getting ready to post a frantic question until I stumbled on the solution. This is bound to happen to someone else (probably already has) so I'll offer my workflow.

I had been using FCP but had switched to other applications, while FCP was still open. When I switched back to FCP I got an utterly black screen. The dock was in "hide" mode (but I never set it that way) so I could go to other apps, but always a fully black Dell 24 inch screen when FCP came to the front. I quit FCP and opened it again - still black. I restarted the computer, opened FCP with no project - still black. Dropped a project file on FCP to open it - still black.

If I moused to the top of the screen, the FCP menu bar would appear, and I could select things to my heart's content, but nothing helped. I tried ctrl-U for a standard layout, tried other layouts, no better. Here's where it really got weird: As long as FCP was not the frontmost window, I could see the entire interface behind what was in front, just like it should be, but if I clicked on it to being it to the front everything went black again. I figured trashing preferences might solve this, but I didn't want to do that yet because I had it the way I liked it.

By this time you may have figured out what was going on, and last night I was literally lying in bed thinking about it and suddenly realized what it might be. And this morning I confirmed what it was. I brought up the black screen and pressed Escape, and there was FCP back again! I had been in Digital Cinema Desktop Preview, at a black section of a timeline, when I switched to another app, and there I was until I was able to exit DCDP the "normal" way.

I find it utterly amazing that this state survived FCP being restarted repeatedly, and even survived rebooting the whole computer. I wonder if trashing preferences would have fixed it? What I realized is that never before had I switched out of FCP while DCDP was active, I always escape out of it when I'm through watching.

Thanks for listening, Doc, I feel better already.

Scott

> I find it utterly amazing that this state survived FCP being restarted repeatedly, and even
> survived rebooting the whole computer. I wonder if trashing preferences would have fixed it?

Because your External Video preferences don't change...unless you changed them.

Next time, just press APPLE-F12 to toggle off External Video and your FCP interface would come back.

Dumping preferences would have gotten rid of it, but it's not worth losing your preferences over something so bone-headed.


www.derekmok.com

I realize that my Video Playback was set to DCDP, and tends to stay that way until changed, but this had to be ALSO a case of External Video being set to All Frames, and my experience is that that gets reset to None just by coughing sometimes. I'm always having to set it back to All Frames. Except this time....

Scott