Re: h.264 vids not exporting in FCP... never happened before

I'm a FCP noob so have patience with me please. For a few months I was using eyeTV to record h.264 HD vids on my xbox and editing them in FCP was a breeze. All I did was import the recording, did my editing, rendered, and exported. All of a sudden I was getting a "General error (34)" error when it finished trying to export, and the file would be corrupt. I scoured the net and saw a bunch of fixes for this, with mixed results. I tried about 5 different methods before finally being told to use compressor to change it from h.264 to a ProRes 442 LT codec.

This worked great for getting the vid to export, and now have a good quality .mov vid. So i try to upload the vid to youtube, and not only does it take 280+ minutes, but when its done YT tells me that it "failed to convert file". so I look it up and youtube doesn't support ProRes codecs.... so either I cant export the vid from FCP or I can't upload to YT. A few months ago it was super simple, I'm not sure what changed. Right now I am converting the finished ProRes video back to h.264 but I'm not sure it will work (hope so) but regardless i dont want to spend ~1 hour converting, ~30 min editing/exporting, and another ~1 hour converting back all for a 6 minute video!

Anyone help?

Ok well that works great for re-converting the video back into h.264.... but it doesn't tell me why FCP will now not let me export in h.264 and how i can avoid having to use compressor in the first place.

Hmm ok I did that, still gave me the General Error 34 message, but I think I figured it out. For some reason eyeTV decided to export the original video in HD720p instead of h.264.... re-exporting now.

WTF!! ok re exported in eyeTV in h.264, imported into FCP, edited and rendered, gave me the error 34 message after trying to export.

I believe Apple error 34 means that your disk is full !

As in mt scratch disk or the HD where it is stored?

Hopefully, your scratch discs are set to any hard drive other than your boot drive (that's your computers hard drive) Do not fill up any external or secondary internal discs more than 80-85%.
Steve

I just had it at default, which is somewhere on the main (only really) hard drive. I have an external USB drive, should I connect this and use it as my scratch disk?

Your USB drive will not be really suitable for editing though some have used it successfully. My suggestion is to buy a good G tech or Other World Computing external drive of a size that fits your needs. Install it and re set FCP's scratch discs to the drive. Then you can copy over your media sources and reconnect them to your project. Once copied, they can then be trashed from your boot drive.
Steve

Steve is absolutely right, never set your boot drive as your scratch disk Unfortunately USB drives are no good for video due to the fact that they send data in Packets rather than a continuous stream. Unless your system will accommodate more than one disk internally, you need a Firewire or ESATA disk for your media.

Afterthought......Seeing as you have got so far, you could do your export to your USB drive without issue and from there upload to You Tube. Just don't try to use it as an editing scratch disk.

Yeah I find it strange that it worked fine as the scratch disk before, but now won't, even after dumping the scratch folder and my prefs. So I could try and use the external USB drive as scratch disk if all I'm doing is importing, rendering, and exporting; but not if I'm going to be doing any editing?

You're not listening. Do not use your little USB drive for your scratch discs.

For just transcoding or for export, then the USB 2 drive will do in a pinch.

--ken