Fades Corrupting Sessions - huge problem...

[theflash]

Hi

I am having a massive problem with a pro tools session I have been working on for about a month. Last week when closing Pro Tools I noticed that sometimes the session would close but Pro Tools would go into spinning beachball mode and I would have to force quit. After a day's work last we I reopened the session and it said there were fade files missing and an access violation had occurred. This would then crash the session every time you tried to open it.

I managed to rebuild the session by importing the data to a new session and then by deleting the fades pro tools couldn't find. This got us through the day and we managed to back up and go home thinking we'd fixed that little problem. However, the next morning on opening the session the same problems arose. However rebuilding the session did not work and the way we found to get working was by opening the last saved session and one by one consolidating all the audio in use and deleting all unused tracks, audio and playlists. I should mention that any time we were having problems the word timeline at the top was red. By deleting the unused tracks, audio and playlists the timeline turned green and we could work ok that day.

My big problem is now that the audio on those unused tracks has to be available to the artist to be able to fly in parts to try in the new arrangement - we save as incrementally anytime anything is changed or recorded in our sessions. The older mixes and arrangements
need to be available too. I am trying now to fly in any audio tracks that were important in previous versions and they are appearing as having fades missing. When i click on a missing fade to delete it pro tools crashes. This is a big disaster as we are facing the prospect of having lost huge amounts of audio.

Has anyone had any experience of these errors and if so, how do you fix them?

Thanks for reading.

[dogon]

Do you get the Missing Files dialog box when you boot the session. If so, check the box that says "Regenerate missing fades without searching".
Hope this helps,
Dogon

[theflash]

yeah i got that box and i ticked regenerate without searching but it doesn't regenerate the fades. you just get fades on files that are missing (light blue with no waveform underneath).

thanks anyway

[dogon]

You could try removing all your fade files form the fade files folder (stick them in a folder elsewhere or trash them) and Tools will recreate next time you open the session.
Dogon

[theflash]

tried that too and no joy i'm afraid.

thanks

[DigiTechSupt]

Have you tried trashing databases yet - it could be a corrupted database causing the problem. Information on how to do so can be found in the Setup and General Troubleshooting sticky at the top of this forum.

[theflash]

yeah i have used a programme called pro tools pref and database helper to trash the prefs and databases and still no joy.

[x9blade]

on pc here,just wanted to say i had this very same thing happen to me lastweekend. the flash, i feel your pain i was up till 5 am rebuilding a session from scratch.
i had the missing fades file window pop up everytime then, i would get the session not being able to open and all sorts of crashes and reboots.
the session i was working on was being worked and saved on both pc and mac,it was going back and fourth.
at one point in my rebuilding process i was able to open the session and i got to see some fades, fades fading up when they should have been fading down, weird stuff

[Andre Knecht]

In addition to all the suggestions made above, try these…

While in the Finder, select the drive containing the session in question. Get Info (Command-I), and check the “Ignore Permissions” box.

Use Disk Warrior to check and repair the directories of your session drive.

IHTH.

[Scott Goldberg]

As always,

Andre has a great a idea...repairing permissions on your drives is a great thing to do. Disk Warrior is excellent for that and there is also an application called "Super Duper" which creates a cloned hard drive on one of your other drives, I cloned one of my external firewire 400 drives, and it works like a charm, Then you can set it to not only repair all permissions but it also does a "smart backup" each time you are finished with a long day of editing/recording. You can set it to do it's thing at anytime you want, so if you leave your gear on overnight, it can be set to start doing it's thing when you are hopefully asleep.

It will not touch anything that was on your system drive before, but it will add anyhing relevant that popped up during the day's work of recording Divas and such. The other beauty of this application is that it's $30!!!! Yeah buddy, I love cool stuff that's also cheap. Hope it helps.