Canvas Corruption

Sometimes the Canvas window gets a little confused.

When Firewire Ports Go Bad

A friend as a Firewire port that's slowly going. As it gets progressively worse it starts to do some interesting things when you mount Firewire hard drives or cameras. One thing is this when you mount an HVX-200:

As you can see the files listed on here not only are not real files you'd find on an HVX-200 mount but they make no real sense. This behavior was consistent with only the names changing.

For me, the most interesting thing was that FCP would see the footage while the P2 card was mounted like this but there would be massive artifacts during playback. Plugging the exact same camera and card using the same Firewire cable on another Mac acted normally.

Out of curiosity I reset the PRAM, SMC and all that on the Mac without any of it helping.

Fixing Corrupted Quicktime Files

Eventually everyone has a Quicktime file go bad that they REALLY need. Most of the time, the data is there, it's just improperly indexed or lacking an index. Here are some options:

01) Dumpster. It's an app that allows you to look at the file in a nice graphical (albeit old-school) way. With it you can view and edit .moov resources.

02) You can try this method using Java. Complex but has worked for some.

03) Atom Viewer. The old saying rings true here, if you don't know what an atom is in the sense of data/files, you probably won't gain anything from this. Plus, it's Windows only.

04) HexEdit. If you spend some time with this and know what you're doing this can save your caboose. (It's like ResEdit...sigh)

05) QT Repair Tool. Don't get your hopes up for this one. It essentially updates a file's clut to work with newer versions of QT.

06) A classic fix if you've lost a file, don't reboot, and look in /private/var/folders/ for a .mov

07) Treasured. They have an app that will analyze your file and if possible, repair it. If it can't it tries to let you know if it can repair it at which point you send it to them or a portion of it and they fix it or send you an app that will. You pay them for their service.

Artifacts and Fast User Switching

I've been editing on a friend's system for the past few days under a newly created account on their Mac. We've been using Fast User Switching a bit and I've noticed that if I leave FCP running on my login while my friend logs into their account, when switching back to my account sometimes, but not always, the Canvas will display heavy artifacts and skip considerably while playing something from the timeline. The footage was shot to a P2 card as DVCPro HD, 720 24p.

The odd thing is it's not consistent and I can't reproduce it every time at least so far. It may have something to do with this little-acknowledged Quicktime bug 7.4.5 but I'm not sure. Another report of this bug is here.