A fix for a potential FCPX problem

This may be old news but I hadn't read it anywhere.

I've been using FCPX since last September without a problem until last Saturday. When I booted FCPX I got a gray screen over the finder.

I tried everything to fix it. I reinstalled my 10.6.8 system, did a repair permissions, an fcsk, moved video files out of the Event folder, then reloaded the program from the Apps Store. Trashed the prefs and rebooted. Still the solid gray screen.

I downloaded the Trial version and it worked perfectly allowing me to finish a project.

This morning I talked to an FCPX tech at Apple. He told me to trash the FCP prefs AND go into Application Support folder, into Final Cut Pro and trash the "Layouts" folder. I did this and now it works perfectly. It seems there was some type of glitch upgrading from FCPX 10.0.2 to 10.0.3. Apple knows about this and has fixed it.

BTW - he also said you shouldn't use FCPX and FCPX Trial together on the same machine.

Well, when you pay for FCP X, it updates your trial version, they're not separate apps.

There's a free app called Preference Manager from Digital Rebellion that will trash your prefs very easily and quickly without accidentally trashing the wrong files (or not all the necessary files). Handy to have around.

If trashing prefs doesn't do it, standard troubleshooting it to move the FCP X app from the Applications folder into the trash. Launch the Mac App Store, in the Purchased tab, click the "install" button next to FCP X. It'll reinstall for free.

If it's really bad, you can get the free Final Cut Remover from Digital Rebellion to remove all traces of FCP X from your system, reinstall as above, and it'll give you about as fresh of a Final Cut system to work with as you can get.

BTW, reinstalling OS X is rarely a solution for anything. Don't bother with it in the future, save yourself the time. And take what Apple support says about FCP with a grain of salt, they really don't know the FCP system as well as they pretend to.

@BenB...
when you reinstall fcpx from the app store does it need to download again from Apple or will it reinstall from some package file located on your machine? I'm guessing the former ;- (

There is no "package" left anywhere. It installs from scratch. But, only moving the app from the Applications folder to the trash does not remove the system files related, and I'm not convinced the installer will overwrite those. So I always recommend running "Final Cut Remover" free from Digital Rebellion first. Then reinstall. I downloads the whole app from scratch.

The "Additional Media" is not touched.

BenB wrote: But, only moving the app from the Applications folder to the trash does not remove the system files related, and I'm not convinced the installer will overwrite those.

Nope, doesn't. Had to reload 10.0.0 a couple of times. Never lost my prefs.

Had trouble with 10.0.3 under Snow Leopard. Lion (7.3) solved everything.

I tried to recreate the gray screen last night. I moved a "suspect" file into the events folder and rebooted and got the gray screen - It was a file corrupted somehow when a hard drive filled with data. Maybe it got overwritten.

All my other media works great.

Thanks for all the suggestions for using the Preference Manager.

Doh! Those horrid, horrid corrupted files! Bad file! Very, very bad file! Go stand in the corner! No, the other corner, the one labeled "Trash", you bad file!

Make sure all hard drives on your system have at least 10-15% of their total capacity as free space at all times. Otherwise you'll get weird symptoms and problems similar to this.

Could also have gotten corrupted somewhere else, but verify your drive space. Here's a PDF I give to my students.
www.fcproxuniversity.com/documents/FCSystemMaintenance0811.pdf