can't open file in FCP 3

[Richard Brown]

Based on your memory allocation, it appears you are using virtual 
memory with Final Cut. This is chewing up a lot of HD space, and VM is 
always not the greatest of ideas for video editing stability. When we 
were on System 9, we maxed our chip memory and never used VM for 
anything. VM OFF is a good thing.

Second, Final Cut 3 is picky about CORRECT amounts of memory, and 
throwing too much, or two little, makes it flaky. Try sticking to basic 
chip memory levels, hopefully outside of VM. 512MB, 768MB, etc. You do 
NOT have to have memory equal to program length/media allocation. What 
would people editing HD on Final Cut do?

If the project you speak of dwells on a single hard drive (3 hours of 
DV is less than 50 GB, so it's quite possible) then why not pull the 
drive, put it into an ADS Firewire case, and get the project up on 
another system?

Better, COPY ALL THE FILES to another system (hint: BUY A BACKUP DRIVE, 
another ADS Pyro Case (you'll need two, and they cost only about $80 
each without drives) and do your own Firewire to Firewire backup). The 
most important thing, from the start, will be to SAVE your FCP document 
of your edit to some trusted place, NOT on the same drive. Maybe to a 
CD-R.  This, of course, assumes you logged your tapes properly into FCP 
so that you might do a "from the tapes" restoration.

Once you are fully backed up someplace, try trashing all your FCP 
prefs, maybe even your render files of the project, etc. and then load 
FCP alone, and from the File Menu, try loading your edit. You may have 
messed up FCP, and it retains its errors by way of its somehow mangled 
prefs.

Richard Brown

On Sunday, August 17, 2003, at 03:58 PM, Jerry Axley wrote:

> Hi mac digi list:
>
> I posted this on 2-pop - maybe someone here might have some 
> suggestions as
> well??
>
> 2-pop:
>
> I feel like I am in big trouble here: I am on a g4 sawtooth, OS 9.2, 
> 704megs
> RAM and am running FCP3. The last time that I had the program opened I 
> was
> in my main file, a movie file with 15 sequences but only had one open 
> - my
> main movie sequence that is approximately 2 hours 54 minutes long. this
> morning I went to open this file in FCP and it starts to open, says
> "preparing video for display" works, works, works to open it and then 
> FCP
> shuts down and a message comes up on the desktop that says "an error 
> of type
> 2 has occurred ... restart computer". I know that a type 2 error is a 
> memory
> errors so I started allocating memory to FCP and am up to 2000000k. 
> Still no
> luck. I have defragged my startup drive and the 60 gig drive where I 
> have
> FCP 3 running from. I also have reset PRAM (zapped) ... still, no 
> luck. I
> cannot open my main feature "film" file that I've worked on now for a 
> year
> and half editing ... Please help!!!!
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jerry
>
>
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