Final Cut can not write file

Okay, I thought that permissions didn’t apply based on the fact that Drive Utility doesn’t have a permissions repair option for any but the system drive. The system drive has roughtly 800gb available. I guess this brings up the question of the relationship between file size of a project, and the file size of the swap and cache files, and is there any way to specify alternate locations of the swap and cache files?

Tom, that’s the weird thing…everything was fine one day, then a day later, it wasn’t. And nothing had changed to speak of. Sure, I was using the computer for other things but I didn’t install any new hardware/software or anything like that, the amount of free space on the various drives didn’t experience any sudden changes, et cetera.

FCP has all the updates installed, so it is as up to date as possible. The same with the OS. But again, neither of these have been updated since before the problem suddenly just appeared. The source media is on the same drive and referenced by alias, not actually imported into the project files. There were no errors regarding those files from withing FCP. I believe the defaults for FPX are at default in regard to things such as the cache files. At least, I find nothing in the basic preferences which would change that and I have not gone into any project specific settings anywhere to make such a change. But in light of your previous comments, I’m wondering if there isn’t some way to direct FCP to use another drive — one with more free space available — as the cache drive.

Tom, I neglected to answer the format question: It was formatted when I originally installed the unit, using the OS X Disk Utility and formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

No change of user. I am the only user on the computer...unless someone's been sneaking into my house at night and using my computer! 😁

I reformatted the drive and began a restore from my TimeMachine this morning. After the restore is completed and if the issue continues I will try the steps you outline.

Thanks for the info and I'll let you know the final results, one way or the other.

Oh, and just a point of clarification, I wasn't trying to do an export, I was working on making edits and the error message occurred when I made the first edit action after opening the project file, so I am taking it that FCP couldn't write to the project file.