recovering corrupt FCP files?

heyal,
We've been wondering if there is a chance that we can have old FCP files recovered? A couple of years ago a documentary we were working on for the 50th anniversary for a community organization was killed when we ran in to the "This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut" bug. The information at the time was limited and there were so many posts about corrupt media we were looking in all the wrong places ( media was not the cause ).

Since we lost so much time and money in the endeavor (~3 months of editing on two different occasions plus the time trying to recover lost work ), we replaced all of our studios with AVID, a sign that we were fed-up with all of the bugs and the poor support offered by apple at that time.
Recently, however, we have decided to produce the 55th anniversary documentary (since there wasn't one for the 50th) and we are asking ourselves, is there a way to recover the FCP file, with several months of editing in it.

Q1: Is there a known method for recovering files corrupted by this bug? ( ei: perl script?)
Q2: Does apple or someone offer recovery services for files corrupted by this bug?

Thanks everyone!
bob

Reminder for the "This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut" bug.
[discussions.apple.com]

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1249 - This update may stop the corruption from happening, but the file is still unreadable.

You can try out the pro maintenance tools from DR and buy it if helps you.

[www.digitalrebellion.com]

What? You could've simply gone into the Autosave vault to retrieve the last working version.



www.strypesinpost.com

I had the same response as strypes...three months of editing, and you only had one project file you could retrieve? Three months of editing five days a week should have produced several hundred Autosave files. Not to mention at least 60 manual backups in two discreet disk locations. Also, when the project shut down, you didn't do a systematic archive of all elements? You had no long-term strategy for storing and maintaining the project?


www.derekmok.com

Whenever I get that blood chilling message and prior to going to the autosave vault, I make a duplicate of the FCP project file. On more than one occasion simply making a copy has cleaned it up. Don't ask me why.

Harry.

> Whenever I get that blood chilling message and prior to going to the autosave vault,
> I make a duplicate of the FCP project file.

Yes, don't give up on the supposedly corrupt file. Another FCP station might be able to open it. Archive it and date-stamp it, as with any important project file that represents a crucial stage of the editing process.


www.derekmok.com

Here's an article that explains the different reasons for this error and in what circumstances the project can be successfully repaired:
[www.digitalrebellion.com]

Your situation was probably caused by reason #2, Derek.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

I don't have this issue, Jon. The article is right, though...FCP, unfortunately, doesn't always explain the nature of the issue correctly (eg. out of disk space appears as "Out of memory" ). Nice to know there's a way to fix the invisible DNA of a project file.

That is, until FCPX gets into the mix.


www.derekmok.com

Whoops, I meant Harry

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Thanks for the responses,
Actuality, the issue is we never closed the FCP session ( so we never got any warning until we reopened it). ALL of the auto-saves going back 3 months, were all faulty. It looks like "one day" FCP started saving bad data to both auto save and the sessions file. The media is all fine, we are just hoping to recover all of dialog editing and all of the notes that had been made.

-- I am going to look at promaintenance. But, if there is a way to parse out edl/xml or what ever that would be great.


Hind-sight advice: its good practice to close your sessions and reopen them, checking if your actually working on a dud.

Thanks again,
Bob

> its good practice to close your sessions and reopen them

Yeah.
And do manual backups with date/time stamps. Autosave is not reliable enough for any backups older than a day.


www.derekmok.com

I tried the promaintenance tools. No luck
Are there any perl or C libraries that can read FCP files?

Derek, yeah, even the manual back ups are bad. We simply didnt test them because the session was running. ( you know what they say about hindsight )

Thanks everyone!
Bob

machprod Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Are there any perl or C libraries that can read
> FCP files?

If there were, we'd be using them in Pro Maintenance Tools. Apple has chosen not to publicly reveal the structure of Final Cut Pro project files, and as far as I'm aware no-one has reverse-engineered the format.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

derekmok Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah.
> And do manual backups with date/time stamps.
> Autosave is not reliable enough for any backups
> older than a day.

This is what FCP Versioner was designed for. It saves an XML copy of your project every time you manually save it. It also has much better backup management than FCP. Instead of limiting it to a total number of backups, you could choose to keep every backup from today, one backup per day for the past 10 days and remove all backups older than this (for example). You can also, unlike FCP, choose to disable backup management and keep every single backup for a particular project.

[www.digitalrebellion.com]

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...