Missing files in FCP
 

I finished editing a 7 minute sequence in FCP HD 4.5, played it many times, made a few adjustments that required rendering, rendered, then when I played the sequence, five clips were 'offline'.

So... I tried to reconnect them in the usual way, that didn't work. I hunted for them in the Capture scratch folder, and the files are missing.

I searched using Finder, for files created 'today', files created on the day I captured the files, searched 'Everywhere' for their specific names, looked in the trash, ran Disk Utility... tried everything I could think of, without finding my files.

Does anyone have any more ideas that may help me find them without re-capturing?

Sorry... I forgot to add that the Capture scratch folder is located in an external hard-drive with fire wire connection. All the clips are in the same location, but just the five went awol.

I've seen this happen when using an external drive, especially if you work on more than one machine. If you open FCP for any reason (even while working on another project, or just viewing some clips) and the external drive isn't available then FCP will silently change its scratch disk to the boot drive on that machine. In this case it will put its files inside the documents folder in your home directory.

This bit me bad a couple times when working on a project between my laptop and desktop a couple years ago. Caveat: I was using FCP 3 then, I haven't checked to see if FCP HD does the same thing, but I'll bet it does.

Thanks Boyd... It seems the problem of files going 'Offline', in my system (Power book G4 with external firewire hard drive) is quite regular if the external hard drive hasn't been required for several days, even if the correct shutdown, startup procedure is followed.

It's amazing how poorly I learn from other people's mistakes! But I did learn from my own, and immediately archived the clips to a DVD!

That leads me to another question you may have an answer to:
Is there a way of compressing those captured clips from Quicktime files to something smaller on the DVD archive? A compressor that will allow me to convert them back to Quicktime for use on FCP if/when needed? You'll note that my knowledge of the technology is limited.

Sure, you could compress the files as MPEG2 or another format, however you would lose a lot of quality in the process, and they wouldn't look as good if you brought them back into FCP. Unfortunately, DVD's are not very useful for backing up DV files. Backup is a real problem that we all have to grapple with... I have 8 firewire drives!

Short of buying more drives, of using lots of DVD's for short clips, you could just write the files back to tape using your camcorder or deck. That's what it do...

Thanks for the info' Boyd.

I have yet to get a deck, or even a camera to use as a deck, so DVDs are OK for now.

I have a bunch of old super 8 that's been transferred to mini DV by someone else, and I hired a camera to capture the clips to my PowerBook. I'll hire it again when I have more capturing to do, and grab those files I lost. DVDs will be my backup for now. But I do envy your extra storage!
-- phil.