No Movie in File Error - hard drive issues

Question

No Movie in File Error - hard drive issues

I am editing an extensive project on FCP7 on a 2011 iMac with 3.4GHz i7 and 8GB RAM running OSX Lion 10.7.5. I am using two G-Raid Lacie external drives (4TB each) that are connected via firewire.

Editing has been smooth for many months until...today while I was editing, I got a popup saying my hard drive had crashed. I also experienced some slow playback/freezes in FCP timelines before the hard drive crash. I don't remember the exact text in the popup, but something like "unable to repair disk" or something serious! Indeed, one of the hard drives no longer appeared in the Finder. I quickly saved everything, then shut down the computer and turned off the hard drives. After booting up again, both hard drives successfully appeared and a quick search through the hard drive revealed all contents were still there, thank god. The FCP project file opened up too. However, when I tried to open the main sequences in the project, I got a popup saying "No movie in file" and then "out of memory." I tried troubleshooting reading other tips and deleted all the render files, but that did not work. I tried opening the sequences with the crashed hard drive turned off, and the sequence then did open. I don't know whether I just have some corrupted files on the drive that need to be deleted, or if something with the entire drive is corrupted. My next step is to purchase another drive and transfer files, then test one-by-one to see if/where the corrupted file is located. Any other solutions or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Final Cut Pro 7, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jan 9, 2014 5:05 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,561 points

Jan 9, 2014 6:04 PM in response to play it smart

Corrupted QuickTime movies are very difficult to recover. You may have some luck with Digital Rebellion Pro Maintenance Tools:

http://www.digitalrebellion.com/promaintenance/

which contain Corrupt Clip Finder and to help track down corrupt clips and Media Salvage to try and recover the files from the corrupted media.

Don't just by one disk drive, by enough so you can keep complete back up copies of all your media. This is/should be SOP for working on large or consequential projects.

MtD

Reply

Answer 2

Jan 9, 2014 6:27 PM in response to Meg The Dog

I did keep the original video files on separate hard drives with additional backups. The files were then converted to ProRes, which are kept on these two editing hard drives. I probably should keep backups of these editing drives, but if need be, I can go back to the original files and convert back to ProRes. It would be really cool to fix whatever is wrong with this drive though! Thanks for the tip on the digitialrebellion site.

Reply

Answer 3

editgal

Level 1

0 points

Jun 30, 2015 7:19 AM in response to play it smart

i would just like to say that i ran into this problem yesterday. took me hours to figure out what was going on. for me, it took forever for the project to open...i was getting the "preparing video to display"....then the "no movie in file" error. i cold not open the sequence and copying the sequence to a new project did not help. opening an older sequence from the autosave vault did not do the trick.

i finally found the culprit: a ruggged lacie drive that the media was on. for some reason, it spun down sporadically. once i disconnected the drive, the project opened right up. HOWEVER, about 20 min. later it happened again. it was the drive itself. in the finder, it said it was connected but it wasn't. check your drive. disconnect and open up another project on another drive to ensure it is not fcp. then reconnect the "faulty" drive and see what happens. for me, i eventually transferred all the media from the lacie onto my caldigit drive and all was fine. it was deceiving, as i say, because finder showed it connected the entire time, but it wasnt. hope this helps someone.

Reply