Spanned files won't iport into FCP 6

F

FilmBoy77

Veteran
i have a video clip over 4Gb apparently (13 min long video shot in 720pn) and it will not import using log and transfer with FCP 6. i've clicked on the "preferences" tab and tried unchecking the "remove pulldown and duplicate frames" box and it still wont work. been googling for the past hour under random searches and not finding anything....does anyone know what the issue or solution is?


i had this problem two months ago but do not remember what i did in order to get the spanned footage
 
I have a hunch as to what's going on here. I suspect your computer's internal hard drive, or your external, whichever you're using as your scratch disc, is formatted to FAT32, which disallows the creation of files greater than or equal to 4 gigs. FCP can't properly ingest, aka create a new file with what it's log&transferring, if the volume on which FCP is attempting create this new file doesn't allow anything to be made as big as need be.

And since the clip, as you mention in the topic, was spanned over two cards, it's probably split in such a way that keeps either raw P2 file from exceeding that 4 gig limit, which could be why this wasn't an issue earlier in the workflow game.

I hope all of this made sense, now solutions... Assuming your scratch disc's an external: If there's nothing else (or, nothing else of importance) on the drive you're using, you can reformat it using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder, to be found in Applications. This will of course wipe the drive, so you'd have to take whatever steps necessary to prevent you having to re-ingest all your footage all over again, etc.

If there's too much important material already on the drive, considering purchasing a new one. Storage is sweetly cheap these days. Just make sure, should you go this route, that you format the drive on arrival to a type that won't restrict file sizes.

Now, if you're problem is that your scratch disc drive is internal-- which it could be, cuz I'm no expert, though I can't imagine a Mac internal hard drive under any circumstances being formatted and delivered at FAT32-- but if that is the issue, default to the latter above option. Just buy a new hard drive, and you'll have plenty of new space and formatting options that aren't so restrictive.


I hope any of this can be of some help to you! Good luck.
 
Assuming you have the lastclip.txt file, I follow Shane's suggestions:

make sure your file names aren't too long. Try shortening them and see if that works.

ALSO make sure that the folders that contain the CONTENTS folder doesn't have any odd characters like /!@#$%^&*()?.
 
yep, no odd characters, name was shortened, etc. my scratch is on an external drive and there's a lot of other files on it that i need.

(for anybody that runs into this issue) what i ended up doing is importing a portion of the clip, then setting my in point where the out point was so that it's basically broken into two seamless clips that i can just put side by side on the timeline and there was no skip or notice that it was two clips.

its amazing how many posts i found from the usual video production forums where people had this issue but they ended up not getting it resolved.
 
I drill down until I get to the video folder, move some files out somewhere temporarily until there are less than 4 gigs left, then bring the other files in and put them back in the video folder where ever the new location is.
 
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