Clips mostly removed from timeline

I have been working with Final Cut Pro for about a month. I imported a project from iMovie into Final Cut Pro that has two hours and a quarter of demo audio for a sung-through musical with a clip of an empty stage through the whole thing and titles describing the stage directions and other pertinent information. I decided I wanted to do better than that so I got the storyboard application Previs Pro and have been generating from 30 to 50 clips per song showing the settings and the action on stage. As I learned more I doubled back to improve what I had done. As I was working on the first song I discovered, to my horror, that at some point all of the jpeg clips for the other songs had been removed from the timeline. Using undo I managed to get about half of them back, but the rest must have been removed during some earlier session. I didn't know enough to have enabled backups. This is a major disaster. A lot of work vanished. -- Is there any way to recover, or do I have to go through reinserting the clips. -- Also, is there a way to set it up so that everything stays linked to the audio? While I am working on one song I don't want any of the clips associated with the other songs to be touched in any way. I want them to stay put. They belong with their audio. I especially don't want them to get knocked off of the timeline.

Mac Studio (2023)

Posted on Sep 27, 2025 4:31 PM

Reply
1 reply

Sep 27, 2025 8:59 PM in response to Greggdb

By default FCP will create backups in your ~/Movies/Final Cut Backups folder approximately every 15 minutes. An easy way to restore is with your working library open, select use the File->Open Library->From Backup... and then choose a backup date that you think is prior to the deletion. This will create a new library named the date and time of the backup.


The backups are only of the database, no footage is contained in the backup, so depending on how you configured FCP to manage imported footage (Leave in place, or Copy to library), you might need to do a little more. Try starting with restoring an older backup and see if you can view an older version of the project. If you can, from within FCP just drag the project from the backup library into an event in your working library.


Restore a library in Final Cut Pro for Mac - Apple Support

Clips mostly removed from timeline

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.