Final Cut Pro X saves projects unreliable

DJ Duke wrote:

I agree. I have not lost a single thing and I only crashed one time because I tried to open an incompatible plug in. Maybe because they use older laptops.

If you -read- the posts on this several other forums you would realize it's happening across the board to both old and brand new machines... and, is a serious problem. Whether it's happening to you or not is irrelevant, these folks are asking for help.

one thing to try is to see if any error messages are being reported in the system log files.

In the Applications/Utilities folder, open the "Console" application. This lets you see all the log files that are "behind the scenes" for your computer.

At the top of the left-hand panel, select "All Messages" and then type "final" into the search box in the upper-right hand corner. That should filter the messages to include anything related to final cut pro. Maybe there's some info in there that might help.

Since this isn't happening for me, I can't really see if there will be or will not be helpful information, but maybe someone else can give it a try, especially right after they have the undo button become inactive.

I think I've worked this out. The history goes grey and it fails to autosave if I go into the transform tool and don't click the 'done' button after making my onscreen changes - the system probably disables the autosave briefly so that the transformation is seen as a single step. Problem is its too easy to forget. To stop myself from doing this, I've been dragging the numerical values rather than go into the transform tool as its too easy to click on something else rather than the 'done' button. Since this, haven't had a problem.

Just a thought -- could this be happening under Snow Leopard (which does not have autosave built in) and not under Lion (which doers have autosave built in)? I'm training myself on FCP X on a separate workstation which now runs Lion and it hasn't so far exhibited save problems.

Rod

All I make is 4 minute tuitional music videos. Imagine trying to use fcpx to produce a feature film such as harry-potter.

Just finished recording a track in Logic.

All I want to do is import the audio into fcpx.

I import, all ok, but when I re-open fcpx, the file is not in the event even though it was copied to the event folder in the finder.

Un-usable and a complete joke.

I'll be finishing off this project in fce7.

I think i figured this out. I was having the same problem on a brand new iMac with Lion and 16GB of RAM. I noticed an odd hesitation in FCP after large project changes and the "Undo" function would stop working. After that, FCP would stop Auto Saving too. As a recent convert to Mac OS X, i suspected something was interfering with the file system or memory. Sure enough, I add exclusions to my real time AV solution for all of the FCP directories (program, project files, and source) and AutoSave began to work correctly again as advertised. I can only guess that like in the PC world, the AV solution was locking all the "touched" files and preventing FCP from a proper AutoSave. Once it failed, it was dead from there on out. If any users are running real time AV, or even time machine on a FCP project directory, you may want to check this out and confirm with proper exclusions. Since i did this, no more problems with AutoSave. Can anyone else confirm if it works for them ?

Same thing happened to me. I lost 2-3 hours of work with this problem and are you guys sure there is absolutely sure there is no fix? 😕

So far I have had no luck finding my lost file.

Good luck to the rest of you.

McShamus wrote:

It's not related to Lion! Users experience this on Snow Leopard as well.

Looking at all the posts relating to Auto-Save not working and the non-functional UNDO entry in the menu points to FCPX running into an "action" or combination of actions it doesn't understand, whether that causes an internal error loop (can't undo a loop) or some other internal error is still a bit of a mystery as it's happening under several different scenarios.

Does anyone notice the program slowing down after the Undo function becomes unavailable?

I suffered badly from Autosave not working but for me, Undo was still working, so I had no idea when Autosave wasn't working.

I was running FCP X on my Lion OS and eventually did a CLEAN REINSTALL.

(By this, I mean erase and reinstall the system, then manually reinstall any applications I wanted. To erase then reinstall and then import settings and applications etc from a backup is likely to bring back whatever was causing the conflict in the first place).

FCP X has worked perfectly ever since.

I have not installed FCP Studio 3 - and I don't intend to, unless I really need it.

Andy

andynick wrote:

I suffered badly from Autosave not working but for me, Undo was still working, so I had no idea when Autosave wasn't working.

I was running FCP X on my Lion OS and eventually did a CLEAN REINSTALL.

(By this, I mean erase and reinstall the system, then manually reinstall any applications I wanted. To erase then reinstall and then import settings and applications etc from a backup is likely to bring back whatever was causing the conflict in the first place).

FCP X has worked perfectly ever since.

I have not installed FCP Studio 3 - and I don't intend to, unless I really need it.

Andy

Hey... it's just like PC's used to be! 😉

Newsflash..

Was just informed by Apple that the "It Just Works" ad hype does NOT apply to the 'Professional Applications" series of software. (seriously)

So now everyone can chill out regarding FCPX.

hafken wrote:

hah hah...can you give some more context surrounding that exchange of information? Sounds like it might be entertaining.

I had called regarding one of my client's Logic_Pro_Audio software upgrades, he installed Lion over the top of his Snow Leopard 10.6.5 setup, which was working perfectly well. Logic would no longer open.. I called support to see if there had been any reports of Logic not opening under a Lion upgrade, this was the latest version of Logic.

Support guy mentioned yes, there have been several related support problems and that they were working on a solution (it was MIDI drivers that needed updating) and that I was to leave my number and we would be called when a fix was in the books.

Anyway, I casually said "so much for "It Just Works" eh'?

His reply was: That's only for software shipped with the operating system, not pro apps.

In a way, I can understand that, but it was funny to hear it.

pancenter-

Pancenter wrote: When the "Undo" menu entry becomes inaccessible, beware.. .you will lose work.

This is not strictly true.

There are many operations on FCP X that cannot simply be undone with Ctrl+Z, so the undo button greys out even when autosave is working perfectly.

Working in the keyword editor is a good example of this. You cannot do Ctrl+Z within the editor (but, of course you can delete the keyword from there). Click the edit button and you'll see that undo is greyed out.

If you come out of the keyword editor and into (say) the browser, you can undo a keyword you just applied with Ctrl+Z.

If you're getting crashes, autosave problems and the like, there is more than likely some conflict on your system drive. Create a new user and try FCP X from there.

I did this, and FCP X worked perfectly on the new account. To be absolutely certain my MacPro's system was squeaky clean, I then did a clean reinstall and FCP X has worked reliably ever since.

I have over 3700 clips on one event at the moment - probably not advisable but it's a good test. FCP X is coping very well but sometimes slowly. (It helps to work without the waveforms displayed as these slow things down considerably).

Do you have FC Studio or an older version of FCP on the same drive as FCP X? This is known to cause problems and not advised by Apple.

Andy

Andy

McShamus wrote: I had this problem on a brand spanking new 27" iMac with a clean install of Snow Leopard.

That's interesting. Did you have any other Final Cut applications on there?

(I'm usinig Lion, so things may be different).

Andy