Here I am in my frozen garage/office working away at this documentary. Spent a lot of today looking at b-roll, but then I wanted to export a small movie of this current cut to take with me on the plane as I fly to the east coast for business. Something to watch on my iphone or computer on the 7 hour flight….besides WANTED that is.

But I had a problem…I had a huge section in the front that needed rendering. So I went to render it. But part way through, like 12%, it stopped and gave me the perplexing error “NO MOVIE IN FILE.” Odd. I scanned through the footage and didn’t see any issues. But this was a 6 layer overlapping wash of clips with cross dissolves up the yahoo. I even looked in the forums and on GOOGLE…found lots of people with this error, but no solution. Great. I knew that one of these clips was somehow bad, but finding it in that haystack of 90 clips was daunting.

Then I had an idea. The Media Manager.

Yup, typically lauded as the bane of FCPs existence I found this tool to be VERY helpful in this matter. I copied the problem section and pasted it into it’s own sequence. Then I used the media manager to COPY the footage to a new location, deleting the unused media and making a new project. It started and then partway through the process it stops with an error. A clip failed to transfer, and it gave the name, 003GH. A P2 file.

I canceled the process and then searched the timeline (Apple-F) for that clip name and boom, it lit up. I pressed F and it matched back to…WHITE. All white. The clip was devoid of data. There was NO MOVIE IN FILE. HA!

So I made the clip offline…moving the bad media to the trash. Then I batch captured the footage again and boom, there was the media. I rendered without issue.

Nice to see the Media Manager work for once…albeit in a troubleshooting sort of matter.