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A few weeks ago our production’s Mac Pro suffered a RAID5 failure. Fortunately the data was recovered and we began to reinstall the system and core software, namely Final Cut Studio 2 (Final Cut Pro 6.05). As we sorted through our recovered data we noticed a number of problems with Final Cut Pro.

Incorrect Type and Creator Flags

Final Cut Pro would not open our project files due to an error of “wrong type.” Apparently the Mac still uses Type and Creator flags to determine what application owns a particular file (and why file extensions are still optional in OS X).

For unknown reasons most of the recovered data had Type and Creator flags that were reversed. What should be FCPF was FPCF, AIFF was FFIA, and so on. Due to the number of buggered files we used Quick Change‘s batch feature instead of the console application setfile.

The proper flags are listed below (format, type, creator):

• Final Cut Pro project / FCPF / KeyG
• AIFF audio file / AIFF / hook
• WAVE audio file / WAVE / TVOD
• MOV media file / MooV / TVOD

With the flags fixed Final Cut Pro opened our project file successfully but greeted us with another error.

This Project is Unreadable

Opening the project file resulted with “this project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut.” I wasn’t surprised because we rearranged our volume structure during the recovery.

I’ve covered this issue before which is due to Final Cut Pro using absolute paths within the project file.

Opening the project using a different user account does work because Final Cut Pro ignores the bad paths when the project’s user account doesn’t match. The project was exported to XML which revealed the paths as:

file://localhost/Macintosh HD/Users/name/path/to/media

This URL should open the related media file in Safari but doesn’t. Interestingly, localhost is stripped which leaves the URL as file:/// (an empty host); remove the third / and it will open.

Resolving the “project is unreadable” error is simple: create a user account with a different name than what was originally used to create the project (if you created the “old” user account, delete it). Open the project and reconnect the media – done.

Even with this accomplished I still could not open the project under the old user account. I’m curious to know what else Final Cut Pro embeds which isn’t easily changed.

The Viewer monitor has two time code fields: Duration and Playback. I’ve always clicked in those fields to modify them and thought it was tedious considering Final Cut Pro has so many keyboard shortcuts. I discovered a shortcut yesterday.

Make the Viewer active. Press [Tab] once to enter the Duration field; press [Tab] a second time to enter the Playback field; press [Tab] a third time to place focus on the clip itself.

One of my current film projects was shot on 35mm with sync sound. The dailies were transferred to DVCAM (standard def) and captured into Final Cut Pro via the ALE files provided by the transfer house. Since the footage was transferred in full camera rolls, I decided to subclip the video once it was imported.

I wanted to remove the annoying suffix (i.e.: 5C_1 from 'ALL_ALL') added to the end of every subclip without manually editing hundreds of subclips.

I toyed around with the idea of using XML to clean up the names but decided it wasn't worth the time to sort out XSLT and Filemaker Pro databases.

By accident I found this tip from Alex Gollner which describes how to change Final Cut's default behavior (via PLIST) such that suffixes are not added to subclips.

I wonder what other goodness lies in the guts of Final Cut's PLIST files.