you down with FCP?

So what happened? Maybe fcp crashed, or maybe you accidentally made some severe deletions to an edit and want to go back in time. Either way the autosave feature in final cut can be an honest to god savior – if you have it configured correctly. This is a two part post. I’ll start with the second part, hopefully you’ll be able to as well!

How to find/open a project from the autosave vault.
Assuming you have already set up autosave (or not disabled it, whichever the case may be), then it will default to keeping the autosaves in Documents/Final Cut Pro Documents/Autosave Vault. Look for a folder with your project name and look for the most recently modified project inside that.
Open the project and let FCP load it. This is important: Immediately save it to your original project directory and rename it from the crazy autosave file naming scheme. Otherwise you will not only start a new autosave vault with your new project, but in a few days when you start looking for that last project you worked on it will be hidden deep in the autosave vault, and probably forgotten by then.

How to set up autosave and why.

Autosave will automatically save your ass a few times a year if you recognize the opportunities for it to help. Autosave will save a new project file out every x minutes and keep x number of copies of your project at one time. You can control the x’s. To set the autosave directory click on Final Cut Pro > System Settings up in the menu bar. then you will see this menu:

The window above allows you to select where the autosave vault is. The second control window is in Final Cut Pro > User Preferences. This window gives you options over how many autosaves your computer keeps, and how frequently it will save a version out.

So now you’ve got autosave set up, and you know how to recover from one of final cut’s curveballs. Next time you recover from a previous autosave version think of me!