Clips Stacked In Timeline

I'm posting this just to see if anyone else has ever experienced this weirdness: after a quit and restart of a feature length edit, I decided to export a low res version for my director to review. He reported back that he only got the second half of the entire film. Thinking I had a corrupted Quicktime file, I reviewed and sure enough, only the second half of the film was exported. Going back to the project, I found (to my horror) that half the film was indeed "gone". After my panic attack, I found a recent backup and restored from that and relinked all the missing media (which took DAYS). I didn't want to re-render my proxy files, so I started hunting around for ways to recover proxies and other original media and happened back into the original "corrupted" edit and found that all of the first half of the timeline edits were stacked on top of each other. I have tons of edited clips outside the storyline, btw. I would've had to be in a black out drug stupor to manually stack 50 + minutes of footage one clip on top of another. So...anyone ever come across this gremlin? Thanks!

onceuponastage wrote: ...found that all of the first half of the timeline edits were stacked on top of each other. I have tons of edited clips outside the storyline, btw. I would've had to be in a black out drug stupor to manually stack 50 + minutes of footage one clip on top of another. So...anyone ever come across this gremlin? Thanks!

What is your hardware, FCPX and MacOS versions? What file system is media and libraries on?

I have never seen anything like this until yesterday, when on a large, complex 2 hr documentary, I found a blank gap inserted in a primary storyline which slid forward -- but *not* taking the connected clips along. I had to carefully disable clip connections (tilde key), use position mode (p key), then lasso all displaced clips on the primary storyline and move them back, overwriting the gap clip. The many connected clips above/below the storyline stayed in place while it slipped back to the proper position.

In general FCPX data reliability is excellent if used on proper hardware, meaning quality HFS+ or APFS drives, not some cheap ExFAT USB drive connected to a hub. In my case all my data was on OWC Thunderbolt arrays.

Fortunately I had many file-level backups of the library. Usually twice a day I will right-click the library in Finder and pick "duplicate", plus important projects I periodically create snapshot backups within FCPX. This enabled me to step back through the project versions, taking screen shots at the same timeline scale and position, then flip between the screenshots with QuickLook to find the problem.

There is an undocumented command to verify and repair a damaged project. You access this by clicking on the project, then OPT+click on Clip>Verify and Repair Project. I would never do that without a full, reliable file-level backup of the library. Any undocumented feature should be at your own risk. They are often undocumented for a reason.

In my case I actually forgot to try this yesterday, so I don't know if it would have helped. A database inconsistency (whether in the file system or a SQL database) is often a conflict between two different metadata structures. In some cases - say a corrupt B*tree index - it is safe to rebuild. In other cases there is no simple answer and the recovery expert must pick between the lesser of two evils. This could result in "partitioning off" certain areas of the database for the sake of recovering what is left.

When you have deeply intertwined on-disk data structures this might not be feasible within a practical timeframe. There is also risk for some corrective actions. E.g, the repair operation might seem to work but it sets a "data time bomb" which is only later revealed when under high stress. A simple "fix" utility cannot fix complex issues, so I'm not sure what the above undocumented command does.

Latest FCPX and latest Catalina releases, and I've had short 30 second commercials for TV only export 8 seconds of the full Timeline. It has happened three times this past week. Not sure, thinking there's a bug in the latest FCPX.

I found deleting all render files for the Library, and a re-launch of FCPX and it was all good.

FCPX.guru wrote: Latest FCPX and latest Catalina releases, and I've had short 30 second commercials for TV only export 8 seconds of the full Timeline. It has happened three times this past week. Not sure, thinking there's a bug in the latest FCPX...

I was on 10.4.8 and Mojave 10.4.6, so *if* these reports are related it might be (as you said) FCPX not MacOS.

I did most of my current large project on 10.4.7 then went to 10.4.8, and have only seen this once. Just not enough data to be sure.

Unlike past FCPX upgrades, there was apparently no library change so you can run 10.4.7 on a 10.4.8 library and vice versa. This might be useful when troubleshooting.

It underscores the importance of maintaining various types of backups.

[quote="joema" post=103391
Unlike past FCPX upgrades, there was apparently no library change so you can run 10.4.7 on a 10.4.8 library and vice versa. This might be useful when troubleshooting.
[/quote]
Probably not really related to this issue:
With 10.4.7 several Motion Titles stopped to work correctly. There was nothing visually wrong while working - including rendering the whole project. The issue was only visible when shared - OR - the issue was visible when you did copy everything and pasted into a new project.
I tried to create a new title with some specific features with the matching Motion version. They worked perfect in Motion, but didn't work at all in FCP.
So first thing with 10.4.8 was to try out what happens with those projects (libraries).
As Joema said: no update of libraries needed and visually the error was gone (with paste) - BUT it was still there on export.
So I tested what will happen when I render everything before exporting the project - it solved the problem. This not really made sense.
I deleted all render files and tried again - no problems.

Seems there was something really strange going on with 10.4.7