FCPX will not access my hard drives when I try to import

Hello, FCPX 10.1.1 has suddenly stopped accessing my hard drives, internal and external. All I get after clicking to import files is the dreaded spinning beachball. It was working perfectly but has literally stopped working from one minute to the next.

I have tried trashing the preferences,
and I've checked that IMPORT and PLAYBACK are set to the same settings...in fact all the normal fixes...but nothing works. I have FCPX on another computer and that works fine and I've tried booting from a clone of that computers drive, onto my main computer and it still won't import...same problem. I can't use the other computer that works properly as the graphics card is not compatible (fast enough) to work with FCPX. I guess it may be something in the computer that's gone funny as the clone drive works perfectly on the other computer. OSX 10.9.5 on a MACPRO desktop. Has anyone any idea please...without getting too technical please. Cheers

Can the problematic drives be accessed from the Mac Pro using Finder? Are these drives USB 2, USB 3, Firewire, SATA or Thunderbolt? Can you run the BlackMagic performance test on these drives from the Mac Pro: itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-...st/id425264550?mt=12

Also there are two ways to import:

(1) Using the import dialog from within FCPX
(2) Dragging and dropping the files from Finder on top of the Event within FCPX. Can you try this method? Note it will use the import preferences specified in FCPX>Preferences>Import.

Hi and thanks for answering. The drives are internal bar one which is USB 2. They all work perfectly with everything else I do...graphics, music etc. I have no problem accessing them from anything other than FCPX. I realise that I can drag and drop and this is how I've been working on small projects. The problem is I have a few very big things coming up and I will need to see what's there before I drag across. I know I can check everything in quicktime or some other player but it's been so easy opening the drives and watching the clips within FCP.
I'm sure there are many workarounds but I'm trying to find why it was working perfectly one minute and not the next...perhaps I have inadvertently clicked something or committed some other human error. I don't know if I'm making any sense...sorry if I'm less than technical...I appreciate you taking the time to answer. Cheers

Have you searched for files/folders on the root level of your drives which are typical for cam cards.

Andreas

Danish wrote: ...The drives...all work perfectly with everything else I do...graphics, music etc. I have no problem accessing them from anything other than FCPX...I have a few very big things coming up and I will need to see what's there before I drag across...it's been so easy opening the drives and watching the clips within FCP....I'm trying to find why it was working perfectly one minute and not the next...

As Andreas implied, are these AVCHD or XAVC file bundles? If so were discrete video files extracted from the file bundle or the camera card? That could interfere with the ability to browse files during import.

FCPX can only show the import filmstrip preview for certain media types. Some cameras have switchable formats. Is it possible you switched formats or are the problem files are from a new/different camera?

However you indicate it's not only the inability to browse the files during import, but the import itself hangs in a beach ball. As a test can you import by dragging and dropping the problem video files to FCPX, vs using the import dialog.

Re needing to see what's there before I drag across, normally if you select "leave files in place" and don't create optimized or proxy media, the import is very rapid. It is actually faster than Premiere CC. The exception is AVCHD which I think must re-wrap the file on import.

I think many of us formerly inspected the content before importing because editing software used to be a lot slower, required transcoding or the ability to browse data within the editor was limited.

However FCPX is so fast it is often quicker to just import everything with "leave files in place", browse the material inside the editor and mark favorite ranges you want to keep. Except for the AVCHD case, that method doesn't take any more space if using "leave files in place". This would probably not work well a USB 2.0 drive, so I recommend replacing all USB 2.0 drives -- IMO they are just too slow.

If this was my issue, I'd delete the fcpx preference files and do a restart via command r then run disk utility on the internal drive make sure it's all good.

Then restart again and try it, maybe a last resort is reinstall fcpx or osx