Missing fades

[Pietari Koskinen]

Hi there! I am doing sound editing for an animated film. The session length is 24 minutes and I have 60 tracks all in use. Dialog, foley, fx, atmos and premixed music are all in one session. I have also digital video coming from Miro DC-20.

I have about 3500 fades in that session right now so it takes some time to open. Yesterday I was editing one foley sound and when it was edited I tried to do batch fades to it, but it didn't work - I got error -39. I tried again - same results. Then I moved the edited sound to the track above while pressing control and option, so that original sound was also left in its track. I muted the original sound. Then I tried to do batch fades to the same sound, now in another track, and this time it worked!

Then I started the playback, but I got error -9027. I tried again and very soon the computer crashed and I had to reboot it.

I tried to launch the session again. It asked where some fades were located and because I couldn't find them, I pressed skip about 30 times to let the session rebuild the fades. All was first going well, but when the session was rebuilding the missing fades, I got many error -39's session complaining it couldn't create those fades. I pressed OK many times, but finally the session didn't open at all because "end of file" error. Ouch!

Then I did all the usual preferences/digisetup trashing and tried open the session again - with the same results. I always save many different versions of my sessions during the day for reasons just like that, and I tried to open some earlier versions - no luck.

I let Disk Doctor to check the drives for some possible bad resource forks, but all the drives were OK. I thought that some audio file was maybe corrupted (?) and Pro Tools couldn't use that audio file to rebuild the fades it needed. The biggest problem for me was that I couldn't open the session at all and continue working! When opening the session, there sure should be "skip but don't rebuild" option also! I wrote down the names of missing fades and did finder searches, but they didn't exist. Also, I had no idea what was the possibly problematic sound file. I thought about doing some research using track transfer and removing tracks from session one at time to find at least problematic track/tracks, but that idea was too time consuming.

OK, then I tried the following. Because Pro Tools was asking about 30 fades and I knew their names, I duplicated one existing fade in finder 30 times. I renamed the duplicates using the names of the missing fades, and put those new fade files to a new folder named "cheat fades". I opened the session again while telling it where the cheat fades were located - and the session opened! Hooray!

I know that I have now some wrong audio in my session somewhere, but I can use my ears to correct that. And most importantly - I can continue editing! It’s still too bad that even I know the names of the cheat fades, I can't tell where they are located in the session. Maybe I should have used some 1 kHz tone when creating the cheat fades to make it easier to locate them.

Anyway, it would be nice to know what went wrong in the first place? And maybe someone knows a better solution to that problem?

My set up:

PowerTower Pro / 256 MB RAM
cards:
Miro DC-20
MIX core
MIX farm
Matrox Millennium II
IXMicro Twin Turbo
Atto + 36 GB of drives attached

Pro Tools version 4.3.2
Waves Gold Bundle 99
Ultra Tools
Focusrite D2 and D3
Digi Maxim, DPP-1, D-Fi and D-Fx

[DigiTechSupt]

The -39 error is an "End Of File" error, which usually indicates that an application encountered an 'end of file' flag unexpectedly in a file it has open. The most likely cause of the error is a corrupt data file or preferences file, but can also be the result of editing the file in one program while it is being used in another.

You've already mentioned that trashing preferences did not help and Norton came back with a clean bill of health. Some people have posted that Disk Warrior is more thourough in its diagnostic so you may want to try that utility.

-since this behavior seems to be particular to one session, it is possible that the session has become corrupt. Launch Track Transfer, move the tracks into a new session document and see if you can get that one to open.

-You also mentioned that the Fade Files Pro Tools was asking for didn't exist on your drive. First check the Disk Allocation of the session (Setups menu) to make sure that the Fades are being written to another location. If that is not the case, check your drive(s) for the presence of a virus. Run Virex or any other similar utility and repair any and all corrupted files.

Brent

[Pietari Koskinen]

Now after one year I am still trying to open that damn session everyday without luck. It's driving me nuts!

No, just kidding

Brent, I did the Finder search using "find items on all disks" -option. I've also heard good thing about Disk Warrior, I may give it a try next time. I don't think the session was corrupted, because it worked fine after my "trick". The film has been ready now eleven months. Thank you for your support.