48-Hr. Film Project Nightmare

Well, it's been quite a weekend for this editor. I was a participant in the 48-Hour Film Project - and everything was going okay until about 4pm yesterday, three and 1/2 hours before we were to deliver our finished film. At that point things went terribly, horribly wrong. I was trying to export an HD sequence to an SD-format Quicktime. I had done this before in tests and I knew it could be done, and knew how I wanted to do it. But when it came time, that's when the trouble started.
Every time I would try to export, I would get the most useless message I think anyone could get - "General Error". What??? And this happened EVERY time, no matter what format settings I tried to export with, no matter what I did. I closed out, trashed prefs, rebooted, ran disk utility to repair permissions - all with no success. We had a good entry, and the pressure was starting to rise. We could not get this $%^&^%$& sequence out of the box. Period.
We never did manage to get a file. With 1//2 hour left we went into a dark bathroom with an SD camera and pointed it at our Apple Cinema screen, running audio from laptop to camera and shot the screen. Desperation and ingenuity at it's best/worst. Shooting the screen ended up working okay, although there were exposure issues that we didn't have time to deal with. We DID manage to get our entry in, 4 minutes before the deadline - although nobody was happy with the outcome and what had happened.
The worst part about all of this is that when I returned home after going through all of this and turning in our entry, I started to look into what happened and immediately was able to export with no issues. I just wanted to cry uncontrollably at that point, and laugh hysterically at the same time. There are not words to express. After poking around some more the error did show up again using one of the sequence timelines I had created, but not anything like getting that "General Error" literally almost 100 times in the course of those two - three hours yesterday when I was trying anything/everything I know to get it to export just ONCE. I had the settings, I knew the drill - I had even practiced doing this before this weekend with the camera we used and did tests - all that went out the window when the export issue started.
All I could think about was how I was glad this wasn't a "paying client" but in reality, all the people who donated their time to our project were the client. At least we delivered something, but it was only a sad facsimile for the great looking and sounding short film we created. Everything I had done to try to avoid this nightmare was to no avail, and all I can figure is that in the process of editing, one timeline got corrupted and managed to keep any timelines from exporting, or something was corrupted on my video drive that reset powered off and then back on when I packed up my gear and went home. I don't believe I cut/reset power to the drive when all of the problems were happening, so maybe that had something to do with it.
Anyway, thought you might be interested in hearing about this - makes you appreciate not being me yesterday.

Contrary to the information above, your workflow was far from "unnecessarily risky...". Back in 2007 when the HVX200 was all the rage I helped more than one team in the 48-Hr Film competitions that Panasonic sponsored, they used a nearly identical workflow to yours without a hitch. There are some not-so-obvious benefits to shooting in HD and then making a downconversion to SD that many even today just don't understand.
The "general error" bug has haunted many a FCP editor - myself included - and unfortunately Apple has never been forthcoming in exactly all the things that could cause this error code. In fact, I had an Apple Pro-Care Tech support tech tell me that the reason it's called a "general error" is because the application itself is unable to determine the source of the problem. It happens.
As you've probably learned from this exercise you should be prepared to do some heavy-duty troubleshooting when things go awry; you've covered a few things in your list of attempts to fix the problem and here's a short list of other things you can check in the future:
- Connections to external drives, both in hardware (cables, power-supplies etc) and in software (making sure assets/preferences in FCP can still find those drives and are pointing to them).
- Get a copy of DiskWarrior and make it part of your regular maintenance routine.
- Speaking of maintenance, download Onyx (free app); use it's maintenance and cleaning routines regularly.
- Don't forget the obvious; I did see in your original post that you did all the initial troubleshooting (reboot, trash prefs etc) but don't forget things like basic hardware needs: Check internal power-supplies, make sure RAM is fully connected, listen for drive noises (like heads banging themselves silly).
Don't take this error bug as an issue with your workflow; HD to down-converted SD is not only safe but a preferential method for making superior-looking SD content whether for broadcast or DVD.

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What files need to be backed up to make sure film project is safe?

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I know I need to backup the .pproj Premiere pro files backed up. I know I need to backup the footage shot (both video and audio files) backed up. I recently learned that I need to backup the files created by Audition, when I send an audio clip from Premiere to Audition and back to Premiere for audio editing.
So my question is this: what other files need to be backed up? If I round trip to from Premiere to Speedgrade and back to Premiere, is there a file created that I need to back up? If I do a round trip from Premiere to After Effects and back to Premiere is there a file that needs to be backed up? Are there any other files that need to be backed up?
My goal - back up all files needed, so if I need to resurrect the project after computer and hard drive break, that I will have all files necessary to continue editing, and that no footage, or edits, or color corrections, or audio edits will be lost at all.
Thanks in advance.

Hey there Matt, nice to "see" you here too!
I can answer one question directly: when round-tripping PrPro/Sg/PrPro, the only place Sg files "changes" is back in the PrPro project file. Essentially, its designed to function much like perhaps a plug-in "within" PrPro. So that part is one of the nifty things of the Direct-Link PrPro/Sg. Now something I'm curious about in your request is how the other folks with LARGE project back things up whilst working. I know they do not archive the previews & cache, but ... with a large project ... can/does it save time to backup those files also when you do get a crash/corrouption. Is it faster to get back working if you backup the cache/previews?
You note wondering where to store the outputs of Audition work-sessions. I put them in the "main" projects folder-tree. I know others feel this is "content" and put them in with the video/graphics folder-tree. I started doing it this way, but now ... wonder if the other is "cleaner" though the difference may be more of intellectual curiosity than having any actual affect on diddly. Note, as I've got separate discs for each part of vid work ... programs/system, cache & previews, projects, footage/graphics, renders ... that does influence having separate folder-trees per project on separate drives. If the project & content files are all on one drive, well ... that's simpler to backup/archive.
Video projects are so space-hogging these days ... "footage" just gets bigger you know! ... and projects more complex. Planning for both in-work backups and continual movement of material from project inception to archiving it off the "working" station is a must, as you are clearly aware. There are many different layouts folks have chosen or simply need to use for their workstation disc layout. This can have some effect on project "stage" planning also.
For those with a "hot" workstation with say a 4/5 disc RAID system for projects/footage/previews/cache so everything is on one big "system", I suspect everything can just live in appropriate folders under a project name to begin with. Backups and Archiving is pretty simple ... use a good backup program to copy & CHECK the the project master folders with sub-folders to your backup/Archive option/s, then delete off the working system (when Archiving).
And as noted here, there, and elsewhere ... putting all the "project" files & their assorted bits & pieces in one main folder per project, and then all footage/graphics/etc. "content" material in a joint folder-tree on the drive *that* lives on for working purposes make backing up & archiving/storing things much simpler. I've seen all sorts of things done afterwards but the simplest just seems to be collating the "project" files folders and the "assets" (content) files/folders under a general project name folder

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Are there any tips & trics to find this?

iMovie expects to find Projects in the Movies/iMovie Project Folder of the boot drive.
iMovie expects to find Events in the Movies/iMovie Events folder of the boot drive.
If you have moved the project and event to an external drive (using iMovie), then iMovie expects to find them in the iMovie Projects folder or iMovie Events folder respectively at the top level of the external drive. The drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled).
If you have moved the project somewhere else, you may be able to find it by doing a spotlight search for all files having an RCPROJECT extension. (just key rcproject into the search box).
You will also need to locate the Event file.

Trying to move film project between external firewire drives HELP!

i have a film project that i've been working on and all of the media files and the project file are on one external firewire drive. I want to move the film project to a different, smaller and more transportable firewire drive, however, when i use the media manager to make a copy of the project on the second external drive, when i try to open the new project, it uses only approximate outpoints of the clips in the sequence and all my editting work is pretty much lost. is there a way to preserve my editted outpoints? please help! thanks, jkkjnz

the clips all have names. 01_01 until 01_85 or so and 02_01 until 02_52 or so. when the cop of the project is finishing up, a series of error messages appear which say "an unknown error occured while trying to reconnect clip 02_12 [for example] to the copied file". Then, when i try to reconnect the media from the new project, it says specifically for some clips, "02_09 does not have enough media content to reconnect clip in Sequence 1" and then after a list of similar messages, it says "one or more files did not have enough media to reconnect some clips. some edited clip items have had their outpoints adjusted." grrrr...

HELP! Extremely Worried for Film Project (lost files) (please read urgent)

Okay so here is the dilemma-
Here I am tonight, plugging away at the editing process for a short film that I filmed in California back in February, and have had various other film producers and buddies filming at random times out there since. I had all of my footage on a WD Storage drive (this included pretty much all of the video files), and I had already imported all of the files into premiere and was about to begin editing the footage with them. Suddenly, I noticed that I was going low in memory space on my hard drive that I was working on, so I saved my Premiere File, then selected it, dropped it over into the WD Storage Drive that also contained all the footage from the film, and clicked on it to open it from there. However, when I opened the premiere file this time, it asked me to located "MVI_6104.mov", the first .mov file out of 400 that I had in there... and I couldn't find it. I looked for the source files in the new hard drive I'd just moved my premiere file into (where they just were at), i looked for them in my old hard drive, and in the three additional hard drives I have sitting next to my Mac... but the files had simply vanished without a trace. I checked the trash, nothing, and I havent deleted any files all night. They're simply gone, and I've hand combed every inch of every hard drive... will someone please help me? Without this footage I am dead and I am willing to get it back at all costs. Already ran a few of the free data recovery scans, but to no avail.. they picked up nothing. I literally have no idea what happened and I am currently having a panic attack. Thank you so much for your time and I really hope you can help me find an answer.
Thanks.
-Colin

@JudeCotter-
The files used to be in a clearly marked folder on my hard drive labelled "Death Rides The Apocalypse Source Files" (the name of the film). I've searched every hard drive I own for the files and nothing. I can't find even a trace of them existing in the first place. The entire folder that used to be there is gone along with the files! Very strange.
@shooternz-
Thanks. I searched the external drive first with data deletion recovery services, then by myself and I hand combed through all of the folders and video files. I even specifically searched the drive for file names in case I missed something, but nothing. I run OS X 10.6.8, and Premiere Pro CS5.5 The original source files were on the external hard drive with a tetrabyte of space that I attempted to move the PPro project onto, but now their original folders, names, files and everything have literally vanished. The project file doesn't matter since I just started editing but I lost all of the footage in there. The external hard drive still has around 765.3 GB of space left so I doubt I killed it simply moving a project over , but you never know. It was odd, when I moved it, the "Move In Progress" window with the twisting progress bar flashed for a second that it was to move 186.5 GB (which would accurately be around the amount of footage we had), but suddenly flashed and just moved it over in a second. Maybe this will shed some light. I'm extremely confused and worried. Thank you.

Premiere Pro CC 2014 Crashing and Bogging Down on Documentary Film Project

We have been working in Premiere on this documentary film for months.
As we reach completion it is beginning to really bog down and crash a lot.
Equipment is
iMac 27 inch 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 Late 2013 Model
Apple Cinema HD Display
32 GB 1600 Mhz DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB Graphics Card
1TB internal SSD Drive
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We do have some After Effects comps that are linked in the project and we have exported the ones that are complete as QuickTimes to try to stop that from bogging us down.
Any advice on how we can manage this crashing and freezing problem would be much appreciated.
We don't have the cash to upgrade the computer and it has been working pretty well for us so far.
Here are things we have done:
Made a smaller timeline because we were working on one that was the entire movie.
Turned off the secondary monitor and unplugged it.
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Splitting up the read/write items is rather a key to getting smoother operation out of PrPro. Either that or putting things on a large RAID-0/5, this sort of thing is covered over on the
Tweaker's Page ...
http://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page
And I highly recommend you take a look. Their info isn't just "we think ... " ... but the results of many many carefully crafted test sequences run on many machines with all sorts of hardware bits & pieces. You can also register, download the PBM test and run it on your own machine. It takes only a little while to do so, and with the logger app that's included and posting the results back to them, you can get a very good breakdown on where your machine is doing ok ... and where any choke points are occurring.
I think this would be good for you right now ... you need to get stuff done, not guess & try things.
Neil

Exporting audio for film project

hi all
i am doing a over dub for are uni film in stp, have use a video file as reference which had no audio on it. however when i have finish the over dub and export the audio as a mixdown at samp rate 48hz because it is going back into a avid project the video and audio do not sync up with each other. the video file that i have us for reference is a copy of the avid project time line. hope some one can help me new to using stp.

hi all
did not explain very well in above question, had to do an entire over dub for a film that we had edited in avid. to make the process quicker i decided to do the over dub using sound track pro. i placed a copy of the film that had being edit in avid as a copy of the time line in stp as a reference . competed the over dub and exported it as a wave audio file, with the setting of 48khz sample rate 16 bit rate. However when i place it back into the avid project it was totally out of snyc.have tried it in different software e.g. final cut, cubase but it is all ways goes out of snyc. please help as i am new to stp and need to get project handed in
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Setting up Super 16mm Film project

Maybe someone can direct me a little. What are the basic settings for a Super 16mm project ?
We are shooting 16mm which is transfered to DVcam format for Dailies.
I imported Flex files information into Cinematools.
But I cannot import them as they are into FCP 6.01
And what will be my settings for capturing and the sequence?

I guess I will not be able to see Keycode # in FCP, is that correct,
Correct. FCP does not have the film interface that Avid does. But Avid was designed around a film workflow...then moved to TV. So it will have more options. BUT...if this telecine was done properly, you should have BURN IN numbers on the tapes. Keycode, tape TC, audio TC...the usual.
We are not going to have a negative cut but a 2K scan . The lab made some HD Masters.
SO these are dubs of the HD masters? OK, what is the frame rate on the HD masters? 23.98? If so, then yes, AFTER YOU CAPTURE, remove the pulldown with either FCP or Cinema Tools to get you to 23.98, and check EVERY CLIP so that you make sure that the TC matches at the head, middle, and end of them. Yes, this is tedious...but it has to be done. Typically this is the Assistants job.
Shane

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So my Boss, old Boss no longer, left 2 years ago started a projected I suggested to go VoIP Phone. I gave the cost, savings, down time etc.. if done right.He goes and get 2 companies, one to redo all of our firewalls and access points (From a Site Survey) Company 1 (Only company to do be used no others to be processed) says "You're access points are old and outdated.. He agrees and says "Okay let's do your method"
So they bring in Sonicwalls and Sonicpoints, Sonicwalls are okay but, they forgot our wireless users use our printers, ooops they can't see then now as they are VLAN's and the VLAN's don't trust each other (All hell breaks loose, no one can print)... I was never involved in any of this at all.Now MAC users cannot connect to wireless, All Covered brought to 3 sites, they can't figure out anything. I put my Access Points back...
This topic first appeared in the Spiceworks Community

So my Boss, old Boss no longer, left 2 years ago started a projected I suggested to go VoIP Phone. I gave the cost, savings, down time etc.. if done right.He goes and get 2 companies, one to redo all of our firewalls and access points (From a Site Survey) Company 1 (Only company to do be used no others to be processed) says "You're access points are old and outdated.. He agrees and says "Okay let's do your method"
So they bring in Sonicwalls and Sonicpoints, Sonicwalls are okay but, they forgot our wireless users use our printers, ooops they can't see then now as they are VLAN's and the VLAN's don't trust each other (All hell breaks loose, no one can print)... I was never involved in any of this at all.Now MAC users cannot connect to wireless, All Covered brought to 3 sites, they can't figure out anything. I put my Access Points back...
This topic first appeared in the Spiceworks Community

True 24fps Film Project out to DVCam Tape - Proper Settings?

I have a TRUE 24fps 1080x1920 Uncompressed Quicktime of my film. I'm going to be using Premiere Pro CS5 connected via Firewire to a Sony HVR-Z1U Camcorder, which is capable of DVCAM recording and playback. I need to record the film to DVCAM tape for a film festival....and I was wondering 2 things:
1. What framerate is needed for DVCam? I'm guessing I will need to convert the film to 23.976 before outputing it to tape....
2. If I need to convert to a 23.976 file beforehand....what is the best quality file for output to DVCam? The best way I know of currently to convert my true 24p footage to 23.976 is by going into After Effects and converting to MPEG2...setting the M-Frame to 3 and the N-Frame to 12 so I avoid conversion flicker problems....but I know MPEG2 will probably be pretty lossy compared to other file formats that DVCam tapes can handle.
Any help would be much appreciated!
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Doron Kipper

DV and DVCAM are effectively the same, 720 x 480 NTSC or 720 x 576 PAL and the framerate is 60i or 50i. Assuming NTSC you need to rewrap to 60i using MS DV AVI.

How To Capture Sync Sound for Film Project

Wisdom from the Greater Good Sought OR Please Point Me in the Right Direction
Gearing up to shoot and edit an independent feature. Everything shot on film (16 and 35) sound recored on DAT. Film will be Xfered to DV and DVCPRO HD. DV will be cut on new Powerbook G4 using offline RT. Online (still using FCP) will then be done on a G5 using the HD tapes. Should we sync the DAT audio with the film to DV and HD Xfer - or capture seperately with a DAT deck into the powerbook and sync up with FCP? Syncing during the film to tape Xfer seems the simplest - but may end up eating too much of our limited budget. What sort of workflow issues will I be in for if we decide to bring the DAT into the computer separately? What else do I need to consider?
Any thoughts, ideas, warnings appreciated. Thanks.

What Jerry says. About the only thing to be done with the DATs after that is pulling off all the wild tracks for the sound portion of the edit.
Locling them up in fcp is, to my way of thinking, a TERRIFIC waste of time and offers you the most potential headaches when thinks get unlinked.

High School Student Having Trouble With Film Project

Hey everyone,
This is the first project I'm making with Final Cut, and whenever I log and capture a clip I get the following message:
"The audio sample rate of one or more of your captured media files does not match the sample rate on your source tape. This may cause the video and audio of these media files to be out of sync. Make sure the audio sample rate of your capture preset matches the sample rate of your tape."
Does anybody know how I can fix this? Where can I find the sample rate of my tape?
Thanks!

Each cam may be a little different, but drill down into your cam's menu to find something like Audio Settings. You are looking for 48K or 32K. Your project's Easy Setup has to match those settings ... DV NTSC for 48K or DV 32 or 32K
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Question: Moved a Feature film project file from pc to mac shot on a red. It loaded...media all linked..still says Media Offline in the preview window

So all the media is linked. Files play in the work window but not in the preview window... Thumbnails are all there....on the timeline it says all the media is linked...sound plays...but no vid...
on a mac late 2014 imac. 27 in. retina...3.5 Ghz processor 8 gigs ram...etc.
hellllp.....

nevermind. solved it!

Is there a way to convert iMovie projects to HDCAM for a short film submission? They also accept 35mm or D i g i t a l B e t a N T S C. Help!!!

I am working on a short film project for a film festival - they require the film to be in either 35mm, Digital Beta NTSC or HDCAM. Is this possible with IMovie or in Adobe? I have tried to research this online and am not finding out much information. I am hoping someone here has knowledge of these types of conversions and can point me in the right direction. Help!!! Thank you in advance for any thoughts or ideas!!!

35mm is film and Digital Beta and HDCAM are tape.
iMovie is not able to output to tape and even if it were you'd need a the appropriate tape deck to do it.
Your best bet is to find a television post production house that can take a computer file and output it to tape.
Where are you located?
Matt

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48-Hr. Film Project Nightmare

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