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Footage turns Black and cannot be relinked or viewed

I have been having an issue recently with Final Cut Pro where some of my clips will suddenly turn Black and become un-viewable. They cannot be fixed by relinking the media, resetting FCP preferences/cache, Creating new libraries, restarting my Mac, reinstalling Final Cut, or updating to the latest MacOS firmware.


I am at a complete loss as to why this is happening. It seems to just be affecting random shots every day. And that footage becomes permanently unusable with the program.


I have tried re-linking the files, and moving them around between internal storage, external HDDs etc but it makes no difference. Final Cut doesn't seem to think the footage is lost, it's just unreadable for some reason?


It seems to be only affecting footage from my DJI Mavic 3 Pro drone shot in H.264 and using .mp4 container. I've attached a screenshot below of the affected file's info, from MediaInfo. As far as I'm aware, Macs' are unable to open certain H.264 files as there isn't native support for it, with the likes of Quicktime. (Quicktime will not open the files, but Final Cut has previously played them fine)


It is really strange because the footage has worked fine within FCP up until now. It's almost as if it's permanently corrupted within Final Cut, as the original files play perfectly on other video players & editors. You can see that the footage thumbnails are still visible on the timeline and partly visible in the Browser from when they were working fine, though when scrubbing through either of these, they are all just black.


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I am using an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and the latest Final Cut Pro 10.6.10 version as of 12/11/23.


If anyone has any idea what this could be and a potential fix, I'd be extremely grateful for any help to fix this. At the moment I cannot edit this footage at all within Final Cut which has been a nightmare for me as I've had to use other editors to finish projects, as a number of my clips have just turned black within timelines and I cannot get them to go back to normal.


See example screenshots below of what the 'Black' clips look like and the affected file types:

Posted on Nov 12, 2023 1:56 PM

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10 replies

Nov 13, 2023 8:58 AM in response to terryb

Unfortunately not, no. Footage appears Black in Compressor also. It is playable in VLC and Adobe Media Encoder though so it does point towards an issue on Final Cut/Apple's end regarding compatibility with this particular type of H.264 footage. I checked on both DJI & Apple's Final Cut Pro approved camera list and this format is supposed to be supported, so I do think there's a deeper issue here.

Footage turns Black and cannot be relinked or viewed

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