Help - General Error

Question

My Colleague is currently working through a time pressured edit and is experiencing an unusual General Error in FCP 4
A reliable system - Power Book G4, but using a brand new G-Tech Hard drive 250G 7200 Firewire.
Footage captured fine (DV Pal) but working in the timeline he tried to retime a clip - a standard procedure
and Final cut closed the timeline and viewer, posting a message - General Error - Out of Memory
The project will now not open in FCP although other old projects on old hard drives work fine.
He has moved the footage from the new hard drive to an older reliable drive - but 1 file (60 mins in length) reads error bad file cannot copy.
However this file plays fine (from the new hard drive) in QT and FCP.
The power book has 1.5 Gb RAM and 15 GB free on the hard drive
the system settings use the new hard drive as capture, waveform and render
is there any help out there??

Answer 1

Sometimes renders or media files can have their FCP metadata in a project get corrupted. If this happens, there are a couple things you can do to try to fix it.
You have mentioned that you are able to import this file into another project, and I'm assuming that this is on the same machine with the same version of FCP. Our goal here is to preserve the edit that is in your FCP project and fix that project's connection to your media.
First, try to open the project without its media. Unmount the drive with you media on it, and open the project. You will get the "offline files - reconnect?) dialog. Do not reconnect or forget the file at this stage, simply let the project open. Find the clip that is giving you the trouble and choose "make offline" from the shortcut menu. This should prevent FCP from trying to load only this clip when you reopen the project. You may also find it helpful to close the timeline of the sequence that is giving you the problem. Save the project, quit FCP, bring your media drive back online and relaunch. You can also try dragging the entire contents of this project between browser windows into a brand-new project to make an extra backup of your sequences and logging info.
When you reopen the project, everything but the troubled clip should come back online, if you still have problems when you open the project or the sequence, and you sure the clip is offline, then quit and trash your renders in the finder before reopening the project. You can also hide the one problematic file from FCP by moving to another location before reopening the project.
Once you get the project to open without the connection to the troubled clip, you have some options. I would start by removing the instance of the clip with the speed adjustment, as it sounds like this is where the trouble started. Anyway, you can either atttempt simply reconnecting the clip, or if that doesn't work, try re-importing it and editing it back in. A 3rd option is to use Media Manager on a portion of the sequence to create some offline clips you can recapture. If you nest a few clips into t new sequence, you can media manage just that short piece into a new project with offline media with the unused media removed. This may help to get around your issue without having to recapture the entire long clip again.
Hope this helps -
Max Average