Pro Editing @ Home

Fix My Final Cut Pro

by Kevin P McAuliffe
January 27, 2009

I had a great flashback last night while I was working on a project, and I should have taken a screen grab of it as soon as I saw it. It was the dreaded Error -36. I know that all you Mac users out there are having a good laugh right now. I switched back to Mac about four years ago, and I haven’t seen that error once until last night, and I saw it in Final Cut Pro of all applications, and then it occurred to me that most people might not know a quick way to fix the dreaded “Error -36” problem, if you run into it in Final Cut Pro, so let’s check it out!

 

Here is the Apple definition of what the error means:

"This file is having difficulty while either reading from the drive or writing to the drive. The file
may have been improperly written data to the drive or the hard drive or disk may be damaged.
This is almost always indicative of a media error (hard error on the disk). Sometimes (rarely) it is transient.

Solutions: Try copying the file to another drive. Use a disk recovery software, such as Disk First Aid to examine the disk. You can try rebooting with all extensions off. Once in a while this will allow you to read the data. The file in question should be restored from a backup that was stored on a different disk. Regular backups can reduce the time to recover from this error."

 

Here’s where things get interesting, as I didn’t want to copy the file to another drive, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get rid of the error. I’ve seen this happen with assistant editors many times, and in most cases, they get frustrated, give up, and don’t get their needed work finished. So, how did I get around it you ask? Simple, I deleted the Final Cut Pro Preferences, and it cleared up the problem right away. To delete the preferences, navigate to:

MacHD>Users>Your Name>Library>Preferences>Final Cut Pro User Data

Once there, you will see three files.

Take those three files, and drop them in the trash (with FCP closed), and when you launch Final Cut again, it will recreate these files, and you problem should be solved. Any time Final Cut Pro starts to act a little “strange”, I always recommend that people delete the preferences, as in about 99% of the time this clears the problem up right away. Something very important to keep in mind is that by deleting the FCP preferences, you are also trashing all the settings that you have set the way you want them, so make sure you go back and reset things like your “Autosave Vault” (Location, and times between saves), as it will set them back to their defaults.

This one will hurt you if you forget to change it back!

When you start having problems with Final Cut, it’s important to take a step back and remember that 99% of your problems can be fixed with a simple preferences refresh!