See, I told you Macs and PCs don't play nice!

March 13, 2008 3:51 PM

I'm having a weird Final Cut Pro issue relating to projects interacting with local and remote media files with authentication on server login.

(I know that probably didn't make much sense, but this is kind of an emergency issue so I'm frantic. I'll try to give all the details here in the post.)

So the company I work for has a couple of video editors in our marketing department who use Final Cut Studio 2 for editing. We're using the latest versions of all the Pro apps and QuickTime. Here comes the weird issue:

Our two editors, let's call them Jack and Jill, are working on different projects all the time. These are pretty typical video projects incorporating video, audio, text, pictures, etc. You know the drill. These project files are located locally on Jack and Jill's Macs, and the media files for the projects are located on a combination of their local hard drives and Windows Server 2003 file shares in the building using Active Directory credentials for login authentication.

So Jack is the primary video editor, and he's having a problem with his projects. When he's got the servers open and logged in using his own AD credentials, the projects will not open. It gives him the error message, "This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut Pro." The weird part comes in here: when he does the exact same thing and the only difference is that he is logged into the file servers with Jill's credentials, the projects open just fine. Again, the projects are saved locally, not on the servers.

We discovered this evening that Jack did not have proper permissions on some of the locations on the servers where media files were, so the permissions are being changed overnight and we are going to try again in the morning. I just need to know what's going to happen next. It seems to me that if he was logged into the file servers, even if he did not have permissions to all the files, the project would open just fine but would have offline media rather than not opening at all. Is this right?

Again, I'm pretty frantic right now because he's in the middle of a big project that has to be done tomorrow and we just made the change requiring Mac users to log in with AD credentials, so if giving him full permissions on the server doesn't work, I honestly don't know what to do next. Any suggestions?

posted by joshrholloway to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Oh also I forgot to mention this doesn't seem to be related to FCP preferences or whatnot since we tried opening the projects on a brand new clean version of FCP and it still had the same problem.
posted by joshrholloway at 3:53 PM on March 13

Not really. It wouldn't have necessarily shown as offline, as it could see the files, they'd look more like they were damaged. Same with the project.

I hate to say it...but either grant full admin rights and no permissions or get a SAN solution that is meant to be used with FCP. FCP isn't 'approved' to be used with windows active directory.
posted by filmgeek at 6:53 PM on March 13

When Jack successfully opens his projects with Jill's credentials, is he doing it from his Mac or Jill's? Are Jack and Jill's Macs identical under the hood?

I beat my head against the wall fighting "This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut Pro" recently.

In my instance, I finally determined Final Cut Studio 2 was confused when moving one project between Intel and PowerPC Macs...even though both were completely up to date and running the same software. This one project would open fine on any Intel Mac and would fail to open with your error message on PowerPC Macs running the same version of Quicktime and Final Cut Studio 2.
posted by Izner Myletze at 9:01 PM on March 13