Losing hours worth of rendering
 

Hi

I work with FCP and an external hard drive where I keep the media- and render files. My comp is a bit slow in rendering (G4 PB). Where I work, sometimes there are brief electricity blackouts. I can't afford power backup right now.

When the hard drive dies, the files go offline. Reconnecting the media files is no issue of course.

BUT: Final Cut behaves, as if I had never rendered the sequence. There is no message about lost render files, and "Reconnect Media" shows the "render" -Tab greyed out. The same is true when I restart Final Cut.

While it normally works to restore an auto-saved version of 10 minutes ago, this whole issues gets on my nerves.
To re-render my comp asks for 7 hours or so.

Please give me some advice. What's the problem? What could I do to make sure the link to the render files is re-stored? (other than the unsuccessful "re-connect media").

Make smaller selections in your timeline, and render those. If you have say an hour long project, select 10 minutes of timeline at a time, render it, save it, move to the next 10 minutes or so.

FCP does not autosave unless you tell it to, and it does not save while rendering, only after if autosave is on, or if you tell it to.

I've been having some similar issues with losing rendered sequences, particularly on HDV sequences that are set to ProRes render. Rendering in small or long sections doesn't make a difference here. Everything goes as normal, but next time I open, the sequence needs rendered...

Thanks -

It's not that the hard disk normally crashes while rendering but during editing and then the whole sequence which had already been rendered AND saved needs new rendering and there seems to be no way of reconnecting render files even though they are sitting on the disk.

The problem is not so urgent since I can restore the last autosaved copy from autosave vault, but it is sort of a hassle.

Also, if I save manually more frequently then the preset AS-frequency, I think it will not autosave, and if I then go back to the last autosaved copy, I might actually have lost quite a bit of work.