First Gotcha
I have sent Apple through the submissions page a couple documented
notes on a major bug and workaround that we have found that is affecting
a lot of people on the FCP user forums. We have not heard anything
from Apple whether they have received our report but I thought you
could pass this along or get us an email address to send this to somebody
over there i hoped they can fix this for 6.0.3.
In short, when FCP opens a project that looks for something (media
or otherwise) in a folder that the current user doesn't have access
to, it then returns the "unreadable or too new" error
message, instead of handling missing media or files normally.
Basically instead of saying, "I don't have access to the folder,
so I don't know if the media is there, therefore, as far as I'm concerned
the media is missing," and then bringing up the missing media
dialog, it says "I don't have access to this folder, I must
not be able to open the project either, or perhaps FCP 6.0.3 or newer
created it."
This is undoubtedly a bug and not related to any corrupt media or
speed changes. It is easy to duplicate the steps to cause FCP to return
this error.
In my testing, this error will only come up if the path that FCP is
trying to look at does exist and there is some folder in the path that
the current user doesn't have permission to open.
If you take the file to another computer that doesn't have that path,
then FCP will appropriately consider the media missing and prompt you
to reconnect it. If you reconnect the media and save the file, it will
then open correctly on the original computer. If you don't reconnect
the media, but you do save the file, FCP will not be able to open it
on the original computer.
If the path FCP is having problems with leads to media or renders,
then you can look at the list of missing media to see what paths FCP
is trying to look into and check permissions for each path.
However, in some cases, the project may be looking for a waveform
cache file. This is especially annoying, because if FCP doesn't find
a waveform cache file, it should quietly recreate it on the fly if
it needs to. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter what FCP is looking
for, if it tries to go down a path and hits a folder it doesn't have
permission to open, even for a waveform cache file, it will return
the "unreadable
or too new" error.
The gotcha on this is that, because FCP doesn't normally notify you
of missing cache files, there is no easy way to tell if this could
be the culprit. Luckily, if you are able to get to the missing media
dialog and can reconnect the media and save the project, that will
also fix the reference to the waveform cache files and the project
will open on the original computer correctly.
The way I discovered the significance of the referenced waveform cache
files was by opening up some of our problem projects in TextEdit and
doing a search for various user's short names. Problem projects had
paths going to waveform cache folders inside a user's Final Cut Pro
Documents folder that was not the user I was logged in as. Projects
that were still working correctly did not have such path references.
I also confirmed this by creating two versions of a project: one in
which the audio waveforms were never looked at and one in which they
were (media was accessible to both test users). The project that never
displayed the waveforms could be opened normally by a different user.
The project that had the waveforms displayed (either in the timeline
or the viewer) could not be opened by a different user.
The Second Gotcha
When a project makes a path to a file and that path starts from the
startup disk, FCP will include the name of that disk in the path to
that file. If the project is opened while booted from a different disk,
FCP will look for a disk with the name of the original startup disk
as the starting point for its search. If it doesn't find one, it will
use the current startup disk as the starting point of the search. That
means there are potentially two places where FCP could try to look
that the user might not have permissions for, thus resulting in the
error.
For example:
When we moved from Tiger to Leopard, we left our Tiger startup disk
alone, and added a second disk to do a clean install of Leopard.
On one machine, we had two startup disks.
The installs of both Tiger and Leopard were almost identical except
for the OS versions, including the user accounts on each disk. The
Tiger disk was called "MainHD", but we renamed it "OldHD" and
named the new Leopard disk "NewHD".
Also, on our Tiger disk, all users had complete access to the other
users home folders (security was not an issue on this machine), which
is why we never came across this error before. On the new Leopard disk,
users did not have access to each other's home folders.
So, in Leopard, if we opened certain projects, FCP would look for "MainHD",
not find it, then look at the current startup disk, "NewHD" and
follow the rest of the path.
If the project referenced a waveform cache file in a different user's
folder, FCP would return the error because it was looking in that user's
folder on the Leopard disk, which the current user didn't have access
to.
If we named the Tiger disk back to "MainHD", the file
would open correctly because it was looking in the old Tiger user's
folder.
If we set the name of the Tiger disk back to "OldHD" and
also changed the name of the offending user's home folder on the
Leopard disk (temporarily for testing), the project would open OK.
If we gave the current user full access to the other user's home directory,
FCP would complete it's search and realize that the waveform cache
file was not there, and the project would open successfully.
(FYI, If we rebooted into Tiger (with the name of the Tiger disk
still called "OldHD") the project would open OK.)
This is a serious bug that practically prohibits the sharing of projects
on a single, multi-user machine or even between multiple machines
with similar lists of users, with a default install of Final Cut
Pro. Either permission will need to be granted for users to access
other users' home folders, or the scratch disk settings for each
user will need to be changed to be stored in a place accessible
by all users (such as /Users/Shared/ or something similar) and
have permission to access the waveform cache folders granted for
all users.
FYI, this error appeared for us when using FCP 6.0.2 to open projects
created in FCP 5.1.4 through 6.0.2.
Hopefully Apple will pay attention to this bug and fix it soon.
Sorry this was such a long post, but Apple really didn't make it
easy to diagnose, understand, and explain. I know I would've much
preferred a simple "missing media" dialog than having to
go through all of this.
