Refused to load project - nearly lost months & months of work

Question

I re-loaded the latest (and 22nd.) version of a DVD SP project that I have been working on for 9 months, as video was shot and included. I had worked on it only half an hour before. As it loaded I got "Sequence FIN-00000001 not found. Cannot proceed without it." I pressed DVD SP's Search button but it couldn't find it and DVD SP stopped the loading process and then quit. End of 9 months work!
That file looks exactly like an FCE render file, but why was DVD SP wanting to use a render file? I tried to re-load earlier DVD SP projects, starting with the latest-but-one but they had the same fault. About 6 versions back I got a more helpful message: "Two Landscapes.mov" file is in an unsupported format. Can't proceed." I searched for this (I recognised it as a video file used by my DVD SP project) and it would not open (it gave an error message). So I re-exported it from FCE and could load my latest DVD SP project. Whew!
What caused it was most likely this. I was doing an operation on the DVD SP project using the mouse and had slight finger trouble. A blank error message box appeared and sat there. I had to force quit DVD SP and then could not re-load the project. Whatever I did must have corrupted the movie file so that when DVD SP looked for it when loading my project it gave up. But there remain two questions:
1. How could DVD SP corrupt a movie file? It was just sitting there ready to be included in the various assets required for the project. How did DVD SP have the ability to corrupt a movie file - it was simply looking for it to list it in the Assets window, not running it, least of all saving a corrupted version?;
2. DVD SP should have been programmed by Apple to simply report that the asset was corrupted and continue to load the rest of the project. In such circumstances no good software should refuse to load, so causing the loss of hundreds or hours of work.
A Black mark for Apple, to be added to the other Black Mark about photoshop files (ending in .psd) with transparency causing FCE to refuse to load any version of a PAL project with that file in it, so resulting in much loss of work - a bug which has been known to Apple for over a year, possibly two, and Apple has done nothing about it.
I hope this will help anyone else getting this bug.

Answer 1

As it loaded I got "Sequence FIN-00000001 not found. Cannot proceed without it."
It sounds like you bought a reference movie into DVD SP from FCE and that the render file was either moved/deleted, which could also make the other message appear about unsupported .mov. The re-export took care of the issue it sounds like.
That is one of the reasons I prefer exporting self contained from FC and then encode outside DVD SP, may be worth trying down the road, though it would be good if this type of thing did not totally trash a project like you mentioned.