Okay, this may be a long winded post but please bear with me. I really need some help here.

I am relatively new to editing and FCP 7. I took some footage of my friend’s birthday party and wanted to make a small highlights video. I am using a Sony HVR-A1U and a new iMac 21.5 with the upgraded video card and a 500GB external Firewire 800 scratch disc.

I imported the footage into FCP using the 1080i60 Sequence Preset and HDV as my Capture Preset. Everything worked great and I was able to edit the video.

Here comes the problem… I was reading that Apple ProRes makes for a cleaner and clearer DVD when using a lot of transitions and such. So I decided to re-import my video footage from my Sony. I kept my Sequence Preset to 1080i60 but changed the Capture Preset to HDV-Apple ProRes 422. Everything imported fine from my camera and the clips show up in FCP. When I take any of the clips I imported and drag them down to the sequence, everyone of them shows that it needs to be rendered (RED). If I go up to render sequence, FCP throws me a “General Error: 48”. All the clips also do not show any video. They are just white with an “x” through them. Am I doing something wrong?

On a side note, when I go out to my scratch disc and try to open one of the ProRes files I imported from my camera, I get an error saying something along the lines of it cannot open an open data file.

Thanks in advance!

Anytime you get a RED render indication it means that the source media does not match the timeline settings. If you re-captured your footage as ProRes then you need to change the sequence settings to match. "General Errors" are usually related to either locked files or, file-type mismatches - which is what seems to be going on.

With regard to your files now being inaccessible there may have been some low-level corruption during FCP's attempt to access the footage after the re-ingest.

Try this: Delete the old project you've been working and start fresh. Setup your timeline for ProRes and capture in the same settings as the timeline. This should clear the general error.

If your files remain inaccessible you may need to use either Digital Rebellions FCP repair tools or DiskWarrior to fix the errors.

Robert, I did what you said and started clean. Everything is working now. Thanks!