Project Completely Destroyed

Currently in final tweaks of a feature project. It has been a bumpy, nightmarish ride thus far with Beta 16 and now Beta 17. But tonight, something happened so inexplicable and catastrophic I have no idea what to do.

I needed to extend a piece of background audio that wasn't long enough to bed under a scene. Like I've done countless times in the past, I copied the audio clip, moved the playhead to just before the end of said clip, set an IN point and pasted the copy of the clip.

Got a beachball. Which I'm used to. I just let DR do it's thing.

After 5 minutes, the beachball disappeared and the project was ready to be worked on again. Except instead of the playhead at the end of the clip as expected, the playhead was at the end of the timeline.

I didn't think anything of it, and, fearing some imminent crash, I just hit SAVE. God forbid I should lose 10 minutes of work.

As I started to go through the timeline, I discovered that almost every shot, every clip of video and audio, had created a twin of itself and copied it exactly 3 seconds and 7 frames ahead of itself. Which was the length of the audio clip I had intended to copy/paste to begin with. Nothing before the paste point seems to be affected, but everything after it is ruined.

I have never in my nearly 3 decades if NLE cutting seen anything like this. I can't even imagine what would cause something like this to happen.

But I'm sitting here with an entire feature film basically ruined, trying to get my backup from 2 days ago to open to see how far back this puts me. We're at 10 min and counting while the progress bar sits at 85%. Maybe this will crash the program? Maybe it will create random versions of my movie all over my desktop? Maybe I'll go backwards in time? Maybe the sky will be green when I wake up in the morning? Anything is possible at this point.

Working on a 2019 3.7ghz 6-core i5 iMac with a Radeon Pro 580x 8gb card, running Catalina 10.15.7--for what it's worth.

Sorry to hear you’re having these problems, but you’ve explained exactly why you are not supposed to use beta software for mission critical work, or projects with real deadlines. Betas are, by definition, unstable and buggy.

I’m in the middle of a feature film now and even though I’ve taken delivery of a Speed Editor panel, and could really use some of the new features of 17, I’m not even considering installing 17 beta until it’s done, because 16 is working stable enough for me (despite many of the known issues and annoyances I frequently post about), and it would be irresponsible for me and my client to upgrade to a beta in the middle of the project, for precisely the reasons you’re complaining about.

@wytshark,

I love your text! It's beautiful and epic. Please keep us informed, hopefully when you'll be back from your journey in the past (keep in mind, though, that you may have to wait for a few days before being able to reply to this post).

More seriously, I hope you'll retrieve all your hard work. Thanks God, you had a backup.
Good luck,
Regards
Eric

any chance you hit the "mark everything ahead of in point", then moved everything without knowing that was going to happen? that might explain the time it took to sort out moveing all the clips....

i guess you hit save before trying ctl-z?

for the future maybe look at making DRT's.... it takes seconds on a feature timeline, and is standalone, so safe from project corruption

helps if you have a valid DRP to restore and then you can drop a current DRT into the restored DRP that holds the links to the media and accurate color managment settings

it's super fasr -n- easy to export a DRT

I wasn't aware saving a project cleared your undo history?

any chance you hit the "mark everything ahead of in point", then moved everything without knowing that was going to happen? that might explain the time it took to sort out moveing all the clips....

i guess you hit save before trying ctl-z?

for the future maybe look at making DRT's.... it takes seconds on a feature timeline, and is standalone, so safe from project corruption

helps if you have a valid DRP to restore and then you can drop a current DRT into the restored DRP that holds the links to the media and accurate color managment settings

it's super fasr -n- easy to export a DRT

This is really off topic but how do you mark everything ahead of the in point?

I wasn't aware saving a project cleared your undo history?

It doesn't.

Closing a project will.

Thanks for all the great responses.

Just to follow up, my travel in time was not as eventful as Avengers: Endgame. It was a close second, though, to be sure.

This will likely be all out of order, so bear with me. It's been a weird couple of days.

To grab everything forward, option-y on a Mac is what has worked for me.

I did have a backup of both my database and my project from a day before. I was able to cut and paste the working first third of the new corrupted project and marry it to the pristine, untouched 2/3rds of the previous uncorrupted project and soldier on with only a day lost of checking the edit. So I'm not lost and wandering around in the woods as it were. Project is back on track.

Whoever scolded me for editing a mission critical project on a Beta, you are absolutely correct. Stupid is as stupid does. I let my colorist woo me into a false sense of security and wandered down this Alice In Wonderland rabbit hole. I love Blackmagic, but to be fair, they shouldn't have listened to Robert Browning because their reach clearly exceeds their grasp. Davinci is like the end-all, be-all of NLE's...except when it just isn't and life sucks. But when it works, man, is it glorious. Kinda like the Ursa. The sensor in that camera is the only thing I've found that rivals the Alexa, at a 10th the price. Until it craps out on you, or drops frames, or does some weird-ass nonsense you can't figure out for the life of you. If you're on a tight budget, or no budget, these guys will get you into the big leagues without Netflix dumping money over your head. But when things go South, they're going South in a big way, quick. Lesson: DON'T CUT ANYTHING BUT A TEST ON BETA SOFTWARE. Don't be a Don't Bee like me, do be a Do Bee like whoever took me to task for doing something this dumb. 2ND LESSON: Back-up EVERYTHING EVERYDAY! Don't be lazy, like me, and skip a night because, aww boo hoo, it's 4 in the morning and you want to go to bed. Back that sh*t up so you can get right back on track when the bottom drops out on you.

My only regret in all this is no one seems to be able to answer WHY Davinci magically pasted clones of every shot and audio clip in my project 3 seconds and 7 frames ahead of the original and killed my timeline. The answer is ultimately irrelevant now that I just rebuilt the thing and have moved on, but for the love of God, I want to know what kind of code shenanigans is under the hood on Davinci that would cause this kind of craziness. So far it's been crickets from the support team. Come on guys, inquiring minds want to know!

And, about the UNDO history, as soon as I hit command-S, that was wiped clean. Believe me, I tried that first to no avail. I didn't quit out of the program. So don't rely on that to bail you out when it all falls apart.

Did I answer everyone's questions/concerns? Add a comment if I didn't.

Merry Xmas! Stay safe!

Thanks for all the great responses.

Just to follow up, my travel in time was not as eventful as Avengers: Endgame. It was a close second, though, to be sure.

This will likely be all out of order, so bear with me. It's been a weird couple of days.

To grab everything forward, option-y on a Mac is what has worked for me.

I did have a backup of both my database and my project from a day before. I was able to cut and paste the working first third of the new corrupted project and marry it to the pristine, untouched 2/3rds of the previous uncorrupted project and soldier on with only a day lost of checking the edit. So I'm not lost and wandering around in the woods as it were. Project is back on track.

Whoever scolded me for editing a mission critical project on a Beta, you are absolutely correct. Stupid is as stupid does. I let my colorist woo me into a false sense of security and wandered down this Alice In Wonderland rabbit hole. I love Blackmagic, but to be fair, they shouldn't have listened to Robert Browning because their reach clearly exceeds their grasp. Davinci is like the end-all, be-all of NLE's...except when it just isn't and life sucks. But when it works, man, is it glorious. Kinda like the Ursa. The sensor in that camera is the only thing I've found that rivals the Alexa, at a 10th the price. Until it craps out on you, or drops frames, or does some weird-ass nonsense you can't figure out for the life of you. If you're on a tight budget, or no budget, these guys will get you into the big leagues without Netflix dumping money over your head. But when things go South, they're going South in a big way, quick. Lesson: DON'T CUT ANYTHING BUT A TEST ON BETA SOFTWARE. Don't be a Don't Bee like me, do be a Do Bee like whoever took me to task for doing something this dumb. 2ND LESSON: Back-up EVERYTHING EVERYDAY! Don't be lazy, like me, and skip a night because, aww boo hoo, it's 4 in the morning and you want to go to bed. Back that sh*t up so you can get right back on track when the bottom drops out on you.

My only regret in all this is no one seems to be able to answer WHY Davinci magically pasted clones of every shot and audio clip in my project 3 seconds and 7 frames ahead of the original and killed my timeline. The answer is ultimately irrelevant now that I just rebuilt the thing and have moved on, but for the love of God, I want to know what kind of code shenanigans is under the hood on Davinci that would cause this kind of craziness. So far it's been crickets from the support team. Come on guys, inquiring minds want to know!

And, about the UNDO history, as soon as I hit command-S, that was wiped clean. Believe me, I tried that first to no avail. I didn't quit out of the program. So don't rely on that to bail you out when it all falls apart.

Did I answer everyone's questions/concerns? Add a comment if I didn't.

Merry Xmas! Stay safe!

He did not scold you, lol.