What's with "Operation not allowed" when saving or exporting

Today, with a commercial deadline on my first FCP job, I've been plagued with my new 10.6 8-core Mac Pro not being able to save projects or export files. After searching all the archives including the Cow, I find that this is normal operation for FCP.

No one seems to think it's a big issue with several "work-around" solutions like trashing the FCP preferences regularly, creating a new project and copying the old one into it, converting PSD files PNG, etc, etc. This is all described as if is a feature. I'm sorry but I don't get it. Why has this issue been happening with Final Cut for years it seems?

Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au

ohhh....sorry

I'm just editing away then a message comes up at random, "autosave cannot be performed. Operation not permitted" or something similar. Convential saves also cannot be performed. The project is a 1080 ACV-Intra (Varicam 2700) format with ProRes HQ compressor.

It's tricky when you have a couple of hours of work that cannot be saved. I found a workaround by creating a new project and importing the old project into it, but this only delays the reoccurance for a few hours.

Anyway, on the Adobe beta forum we rant and rave about this sort of thing until they fix it. I was surprised that such an important issue has existed in FCP for so long. No offense intended.


Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au

[Peter Corbett] "Today, with a commercial deadline on my first FCP job, "

Welcome to the family.
There are few things you are probably doing wrong on your very first project but it's impossible to know from here. The more common cause is not having write access to the particular folder you are using to store the project and that can be caused by network or Finder problems, not related at all to FCP.

This error is regrettable but it is predictable for first-timers. I would have taken a bit of offline time and practiced first.

bogiesan

Peter

We seem to keep running into each other :).

Please take what i say as nothing more than co-miseration and understanding of where you are, as myself, DRW, Les Kaye, and i think Wayne Cole, have been where you are.

When i transitioned from edit to FCP, i pulled my hair out for a long time. Some say a couple of years, but i say about 6 months. (hahaha)

Needless to say, fcp is unique animal, partly cuz its mac and not PC.

I see "Op Not Allowed" in a couple of places: when you try and ovwerwrite a clip if the existing clip has a transition other than a cut(this is my biggest peeve!). You have to delete the transition, do the overwrite, then re-do the transition. There are other ways to replace a shot, like the replace function or option-v (paste attributes).

another place i get "Op Not Allowed" when i try and export or save to a volume thats got some kind of write protection going on, like permissions or something, or may not have enough room, or might be FAT32 insted of HFS+.

BTW, another "gotcha" i found was that undo applies to the whole project, not just the timeline, so if you want to undo something you did before you, say, opened a new bin, you will lose the bin.

Somewhere around here (this forum) is a bunch of threads with DRW and Les and the rest, and a lot of the edit-to-fcp pain is alleviated by reading them

Oh, and whenver you rant about how something may be broken and hasn't been fixed, you'll get this: "But Look What You Can Do For Under a Thousand Dollars!"

This is a great forum, a lot of stuff you are experiencing has been covered, and I hope this helps!

"I like video because its so fast!"

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

This is not normal. I too have not had this issue. I have seen others with this issue, and it was because their folder was write protected for some oddball reason. A REPAIR PERMISSIONS from DISK UTILITY fixed that right up.



Shane



GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD...don't miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

Thanks Kevin,

Yes that's exactly how I've been fixing it. An inconvenience but not a killer problem.

Peter

Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au

Thanks Dave. I haven't got Disk Warrior. Will get it for sure. Thanks again. Have a great Christmas! Boy am I looking forward to slowing down for a few days.

Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au

Thank you for your work around. I just ran into the "Operation not Allowed" problem and your solution really came through.

Just to chime in- Today out of nowhere I started experiencing this same error while trying to save all. The make new project and copy and paste all contents did the trick.

2x3Ghz Quad-core
16GB RAM
10.6.2
FCP 7.0.1

Repairing permissions did not help.

I second Zach's opinions. While I great respect for a number of you other guys. This is not something that happens just to newbies.

And Peter, yes, it is something Apple should address. I thought they had since I hadn't had this happen since version 5. Today it hit me on a brand spankin new MacPro 8 core running Snow Leopard and FCP 7.0.1.

As Shane suggested, we did a permissions rebuild. Thankfully autosave at 5 minute intervals had a usable version for us. (We tried the create a new project, move everything, etc method, but FCP crashed on creating a new project command.)

-Andrea

Andrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director - Owner
Germane Creative LLC

I agree with Damien. I've been using FCP for over 10 years and had the scenario that he just described on my MacPro. Since the project is on an external drive, I'm not using a different computer (interestingly a MacBookPro) and that seems to have helped for the time being. Thinking I might reinstall Final Cut Studio entirely and see if that makes a difference. This is not a "noob" problem, this is a larger software problem methinks.

Dawn

Well Peter I am a cross Avid and FCP guy who is well versed in both and also had your horror. It isn't FCP at all, it is the Mac OS and 8 core machine. They have a permission problem. I am repairing permissions once a week now. I have never had to do that before and have been on Mac since the quadra. Keep the faith, with state of the art comes state of distress.