Image Capture & It's Greyed Out Scan Button

Okay, this isn't specifically a Final Cut tip but since you may need to occasionally scan in things for FC you may find yourself inside of Apple's free Image Capture app.

If you do, and you find it working perfectly except for it's Scan button is greyed out, here's the solution:

Click in the preview window and drag out a square for it to scan from.

Yes, that's it. It's that simple. Click outside the scan marquee square you just made to start over. This had me puzzled for far too long.

Quicktime 7.4 Update Problems

Looks like the latest update to Quicktime (v7.4) breaks some things, lest of all Adobe After Effects for many people. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not :) I'm not the biggest fan of AE in the world.

People are seeing this error after the update:

"After Effects error: opening movie - you do not have permission to open this file (-54)"

Some say it's a DRM issue others, a preferences SNAFU.

FCP 6.0.2 vs P2 Import

Some people are reporting the loss of the ability to import P2 Data using FCP 6.0.2 with Leopard (10.5 & 10.5.1) while others seem to be having no trouble. It may be a bug caused by specific software versions in conflict or specific hardware vs new software versions. The other day I was able to import P2 cards without a problem but I've gotten into the habit of importing them after copying them to a hard drive first.

Essentially, what I do is mount the P2 Cards via card slot or by mounting the camera and copying off the data directly to a hard drive then, later on, importing that into FCP. This seems to save a lot of time and hassles especially when this needs to be done on the fly depending on the conditions of the shoot.

When Hard Drives Die

If you've never seen the heart-warming attempts of Disk Utility trying to fix a very sick hard drive here's your chance. Disk utility can fix most things but when a hard drive has a serious hardware failure then there isn't much it can do but it will give it it's best shot:

Verify and Repair disk “Storage 500G”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 3869)
Missing thread record (id = 3954)
Missing thread record (id = 4298)
Incorrect number of thread records
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Missing thread record (id = 3869)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 50 instead of 51)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 10 instead of 20)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 7 instead of 18)
Missing thread record (id = 4409)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 19)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 3 instead of 20)
Missing thread record (id = 3990)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 34)
Missing thread record (id = 4096)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 4)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 1056 instead of 1084)
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26628 instead of 26949)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 49256844 instead of 49244276)
Repairing volume.
Missing directory record (id = 4298)
Missing directory record (id = 3954)
Look for missing items in lost+found directory.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 4353)
Missing thread record (id = 4665)
Missing thread record (id = 4736)
Missing thread record (id = 4811)
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26714 instead of 26949)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume.
Missing directory record (id = 4811)
Missing directory record (id = 4736)
Missing directory record (id = 4665)
Missing directory record (id = 4353)
Look for missing items in lost+found directory.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26949 instead of 26714)
The volume Storage 500G could not be repaired after 3 attempts.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

Motion .motn render Bug in Final Cut

It seems there's a bug or some sort of issue with .motn files being loaded into FCP's timeline and rendered. When un-rendered and you Option + P play them, or scrub through them they look fine. They even play in the viewer normally albeit a bit choppy.

But when you render them in FCP they appear as completely black.

There are a few threads about this at Apple here and here and here.

The solutions offered there didn't work for me so I'm thinking it may be a video card/driver issue, some obscure setting or incompatibility between settings or just a bug.

The workaround is to export a rendered clip from Motion then import that into FCP for me at least with FCP 6.0.1 and Motion 3.0.1.

One interesting thing is that this works as expected when using one of the new glass screen iMacs and FC Studio 2 so maybe it's a video card incompatibility or a limitation of some video cards.