Alright guys, this one may take a while to explain as I've never encountered it and just describing is going to be tough.

Two months ago I shot some footage for a music video I'm doing. We're working on it whenever the band (and myself) have free time. Today I opened FCP to play around with the footage. I have a rough cut of the video going so there's edited footage in the timeline that I can view. But today I was watching the footage and saw a short clip in the timeline that I wanted to change, so I went to find the source clip in the browser only to click on it and have nothing come up in my viewer.

The clip in the timeline plays fine, but the source clip seems to have vanished. I click on it and it's just a black screen.

I search my computer for the original quicktime file, open it, and there's nothing but a white screen. This is a large piece of footage that I need, what happened?

It HAS to be there. . . that's just how FCP works. It can't play footage that isn't there, so there must have been some sort of a file name corruption or something.

See if you can find the original .mxf file you shot off the HVX. Worst case, you can always reimport that clip back into the sequence.

Stephen

Jeff, I use P2 Log to create XMLs (Using FCP v5.0.1 I think) so that is how my footage ends up as independent .mov files. I'll assume you're importing P2 directly with FCP?

If that is the case, I can only venture a guess; but I would eliminate variables one at a time. You say you found the source QT file, but is only white screen. When you browse to it in Finder, does it display all the inherent info about the file (size, resolution, etc.)? Does it preview at all in the finder?

What about all the other footage you are working with, is this happening with any other clips? If not and it is just that one, it should be easy to replace by re-importing the original P2 volume and selecting only that clip to import. Assuming you backed up the P2 data, you'll be alright.

Jeff,

This doesn't sound specific to P2 footage, this almost sounds like a corruption in Final Cut. I'd have the moderator move this to the FCP forum where you'll get the right eyes looking at this.

You need at least FCP 5.0.4 to work with P2 files.

And because Apple has noted some issues with rendered P2 material in 5.0.4, you should cross-grade to FCP 5.1. There are some import issues with 5.1.2, so you might be safest with FCP 5.1.1

Ned Soltz