My video playback is gone!

I am a relatively new editor and I supposed to be editing on a speed filmmaking competition coming up very very soon! So I'm freaking out! I took some screen shots of my system, and decided to explain the problem in between the pictures (instead of explaining the problem here - then sending you to pictures elsewhere.)

Please see: [www.aprilheather.com]

If anyone can help me solve this, I will be SO grateful! Thank you.

April

What format is the footage you're working with? Is it just DV, or HDV or something else?

Some things I am thinking, on my way out the door;

There is a known bug with the ProKit upgrade which you may have downloaded when you upgraded. This generally causes FCP to crash on opening. What version of ProKit do you have?

What is your alpha set to? The fact that you get an image when you make the background display as white makes me wonder about alpha channels and composite modes..

Yes, if you have no DV device connected, you need to choose where to send your audio. If it's set to firewire, the signal is being sent out of the firewire port.

Check out Digitial rebellions FCS maintenance pack - there is a free trial. It helps in a lot of cases.

April,

A few things for you to consider:

• How full is your startup drive (provide actual numbers and a percentage, e.g., 250 GB out of 300 GB or 83% full)?
• When you launched FCP after reinstalling it, it may have been asking you about your capture device (via your settings) and that it was missing. It may have also asked you about where to set your scratch disk.
• The ProKit "issue" (if there really is one beyond isolated setups, most likely due to user configurations) doesn't apply to you, as you are running OS X 10.5.8 and not 10.6.x.
• You may want to try the FCS Maintenance Pack (free trial) and use it to remove your preferences (you may want to note them before they get removed).
• It might help you to find an experienced FCP user in your area and have that person help you properly set up your system, in order to prevent computer resource issues in the future.
• To help troubleshoot your setup, you may want to create a new project and insert just a text generator into a sequence and see how that works...

-Dave

My hard drive is only 111 GB capacity and I have used 100GB! uh oh?
I already burned through my free trial of the maintenance pack to properly remove FCS - I'm inquiring into student pricing right now.
Creating text in a new project didn't work either, someone more experienced already tried that for me.

The current project I'm looking at is DV. Although I have another project in which the same thing is happening and that one was .mp4 files captured on a card with a mini HD cam and brought in with "import files"
The alpha is set to RGB.
ProKit was installed, yes, but I don't know what version. And I am still on 10.5 so I think that is more of a 10.6 thing, right?
Where should my video playback be sent to? It is currently "Digital Cinema Desktop Preview Main" Audio is currently set to "default"

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April
My hard drive is only 111 GB capacity and I have used 100GB! uh oh?

This isn't good. You are at 90%+ capacity. Not only will this cause issues with FCP, but it may cause serious issues with general OS X operation. You should really try to limit your disk usage to 60 to 80 percent of the hard drive's capacity, especially on your main/startup drive.

A tool like Onyx could be used to perform maintenance (clear caches, log files, etc.) and may help to clear extra stuff off your hard drive. Depending on how you reinstalled your system, you may have an old system folder with a lot of stuff in it. If so, make sure you don't need anything therein and remove it. Of course, you should back up everything before doing any of this kind of "cleaning."

For $100, or less, you should be able to get a new hard drive that is 2 or 3 times the size of your current one.

Check your FCP scratch disk settings (System Settings...) and select an external drive (you should try to avoid using your internal/main/startup drive, if at all possible).

If you can't, or don't want to, upgrade your internal hard drive, consider backing up everything (using something like the free Carbon Copy Cloner), erasing your drive, and doing a clean/new install of OS X and FCP. Run all updates, and then repair permissions using Disk Utility. Then, using the Migration Assistant to move your account files back to the internal drive. Then, reinstall other applications and add data files only as needed.

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April
Creating text in a new project didn't work either, someone more experienced already tried that for me.

Try creating a text generator (just use the default "Sample Text" from the Text generator) and drop that into a new sequence, with the following settings:

View --> External Video --> Off
View --> Video Playback --> None

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You should also have at least 2 GB of RAM installed, which you do, preferably 4 GB, or more.


-Dave

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April
The current project I'm looking at is DV. Although I have another project in which the same thing is happening and that one was .mp4 files captured on a card with a mini HD cam and brought in with "import files"

Even though you can import some MP4 files into FCP, you shouldn't. Use Compressor, MPEG Streamclip, or something else to convert them into an appropriate editing-friendly codec/format, such as one of the ProRes "flavors." Depending on your needs, and final delivery quality requirements, you may be able to use ProRes 422 (Proxy) or ProRes 422 (LT), which will help save disk space.

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April
The alpha is set to RGB.
ProKit was installed, yes, but I don't know what version. And I am still on 10.5 so I think that is more of a 10.6 thing, right?

Yes, the ProKit "issue" doesn't apply to you. If you've run all software updates after reinstalling OS X 10.5.8 and FCP 7.0.3, your ProKit version should be 5.1 (don't worry about the version number --- you'd have to dig into a system-level file to find out this info).

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You should be using an external drive (or drives) with your MacBook Pro for your FCP scratch disk and to store other media files. In fact, you should have a separate (ideally) FireWire drive that you connect to your MBP at least daily, in order to run Time Machine. Do not use USB connections for your external hard drives, and do not format external hard drives with anything but Disk Utility (set to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)). Many external hard drives are sold with Windows disk formatting, so they need to be re-initialized using Disk Utility.


-Dave

P.S. - By the way, thanks for making a nice web page with your description and screenshots. That is really helpful!


-Dave

Yes, I do keep all my media and set my scratch discs to an external hard drive. I connect w/ eSata.
Thanks for the tip about converting my files out of mp4 to ProRes. Will do.
I ended up making an appt. at the Apple Genius Bar. They were stumped for a bit and said they hadn't seen this problem before, then he ended up resetting my SMC (video chip) by taking my battery out and doing something. (?) It worked!! Big sigh of relief.

Thanks so much for your input.

P.S. While I was at the Apple store he helped me clear some space on my HD. There were unnecessary previous user files which was able to free up 16GB. Putting me at about 76% instead of 90% full now.