Did you all know about this and not tell me? Because if you did, WHY THE HECK NOT?!?! I mean, here I am finding out about it just today and what is the first thing I do? Take screen shots and blog about it. You all need to start blogs so I can follow you and figure this out. Or get on Twitter and…oh, wait, I don’t follow many people on Twitter. Well, if you @comebackshane I will see it.

Anyway, what is it? What has me psyched? Well, something that apparently was added in FCP 6, and not very well documented.

Do you have a project that you have been working on for the past two hours crash on you? And you forgot to save in that past two hours? Well, if so, you, like I, go in search of the Autosave Vault, then scan for the latest autosave….drag it out, get rid of the odd numbers at the end (the time/date stamp) and rename it to normal, drag the old project to the trash, put the autosave into the project folder, then relaunch FCP.

A lot of work, huh? I think so to. Did you know that you didn’t have to do all of that? I didn’t…not before someone offhandedly mentioned it on the FCP-L and I went “wait, what? What is that?” and went digging for it.

FILE>RESTORE PROJECT. Open you project, the one you didn’t save and all the unsaved changes were lost. Now when it is open, go to the FILE menu and choose RESTORE PROJECT:

Once you do that you will get a window with a drop down menu. Click on that menu and you will be presented with a list of the autosaves for that project:

Choose the one you want to recover. You will get a warning:

Click OK…because you want to undo this project. It doesn’t have all of the changes you made to it before you LOST EVERYTHING. Well, some things. OK, it might be advisable to first duplicate your project, date and save the old one, and then open the original…just in case.

CLick OK and windows close, progress bars…progress…and then boom, your latest autosave opens and your project retains it’s original name. That sure beats all the shinanigans you have to do to manually look for the autosaves doesn’t it?

I thought so.

Psst…pass it on.