Hello. Sorry for this being so long, but it is hard to describe this problem in only a few words. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I have FCE HD version 3.5.1 and edit on a MacBook Pro OS X version 10.4.11. I have an external hard drive where I store all my video.

One of my shots I digitized yesterday was fine and I edited it into my sequence. Later on as I was editing, I noticed that part of the video played GREEN in the Canvas.

I opened up the shot in the Viewer and the whole freakin thing was green. Then, I went to my Capture Scratch and tried to open the file directly from the external hard drive (it opens up in Quicktime). A message popped up that said "The movie could not be opened. The End of the File Was Reached."

So after messing around a bit more with it (unsuccessfully) I ended up just deleting the shot (both from Final Cut and the external drive) and re-capturing the raw footage again. I re-edited it into my Sequence again. It seemed fine for a while. It played OK.

Then all of the sudden while clicking around in the Timeline, the thing turned green AGAIN! The exact same shot. Again I opened the shot in the Viewer and it's all green. I looked through the Capture Scratch again, double clicked on this shot and AGAIN it said "The movie could not be opened. The End of the File Was Reached."

I looked at all of my other shots and they all are fine. Everything plays normally, both in Final Cut and when I open them in Quicktime from the Capture Scratch. It's just this one shot that appears to be cursed.

Anyone have any ideas what the heck is going on?

The only thing I can think of is there was a power outage yesterday at my place. My laptop was NOT plugged in, but my external hard drive was. When I turned on my computer again, that window popped up that said something like "Device Improperly Removed, Some data may have been lost or damaged" or whatever it says.

That's happened before and there were no problems, so I didn't worry about it. But now I'm wondering, could the external hard drive have been damaged and it's screwing up this piece of video somehow?

Or something else? Thank you very much for your assistance.

Have you tried exporting the clip out with something like MPEG Streamclip then importing the new file in?

It is not normal. You may have a bad spot on the hard drive.
Possible Actions:
1) Run disk utilities or Disk Warrior to repair the drive then rinse and repeat the capture/edit.
2) If, after doing 1), the problem still happens, Leave the corrupted (green) capture file but rename it DO NOT REMOVE and capture the shot again. The idea is to force the OS to use a different (hopefully undamaged) spot on the drive.

If you don't have Disk Warrior, get it. You will use it.

I agree with Les. (it can't hurt to do these things)

Also, use Disk Utility to "Repair Permissions" on your Macintosh HD (internal drive). It also wouldn't hurt to throw away the preferences in Final Cut Pro. These are the things I do for system maintenance when my computer isn't running like it should be.

Disc Warrior.....yep. Best disc utility available! :)

Thank you very much for your help, folks. I will try those things. I'll let you know how it goes.

Mitchell, what did you mean by "throw away the preferences?"

Cheers.

Is it green and pink? If so this is usually a problem with YRB rendering of a plugin that's only compatible with RGB (or vise-versa.) The solution in FCP is to change the rendering from YRB to RGB.