Q: Old quicktime files now appear as data files

Well...let me take a stab at an explaination. 

FCP is based on Quicktime. The engine for the video is Quicktime Pro.  Yosemite (and Mavericks before it) changed QT at the core...Quicktime won't open all codecs.  Only a FEW codecs are supported.  ProRes will open, but not DVCPRO HD...HDV.  Quicktime will first need to CONVERT them when it opens...to what? I'm not sure. I stop it before it gets much of a start. But that conversion means that Quicktime support for many codecs has been dropped in later versions...later OS.

So since Quicktime is the core of FCP, and even Quicktime can't open those files...that means FCP can't...it sees them as just data. Now, this is just a guess. 

FCP 7 was discontinued 4.5 years ago, and the last official OS it was supported on was 10.6.8. But it worked fine under 10.7 and 10.8. But 10.9 (mavericks) and 10.10 (Yosemite) changed Quicktime...and support for FCP and the other apps starts falling apart (Compressor 3.5 and Motion 4, that come with FCP 7, no longer function under Mavericks and Yosemite). 

The only solution I can see is to run FCP on a supported OS.  Which means running it on an older computer, or downgrading, or partitioning a hard drive and installing an older OS, if your computer allows older OS versions.

Do they have a .mov suffix? If not, add it and try again.

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