I have fallen prey to the ever threatening and silent project killer: Operation Failed.

No message, just a blink and suddenly I cannot do anything, all my changes revert secretly back when I make them. I did find a very informative post from a former forum explaining my problem. It described that Studio will sometimes fail when a transition is placed over a J or L cut. I knew I had not intentionally placed a J or L cut in my video. The post went on to say how to check if Studio itself did so.

Alas! I have found an L cut that mysteriously popped up towards the end of my video! The previous forum's post said "If you find a transition in which the audio and video are not selected simultaneously, chances are you've found the offending area of the project. Remove the audio and video transition, make certain that you don't have an unintended J or L cut hidden under that transition, and then add your transition back in. Then, when you click this new transition, if the audio *and* video turns blue, see if you can continue to edit without further "Operation Failed" activity. You may be able to do so (hopefully)."

One problem: I am unable to edit in the first place.

 I am under a deadline and need help ASAP any suggestions would be helpful at this point.

Thank you!

Well....that sounds unfortunate.

If you can't remove the transition, then either a) it's not the right transition, or b) you're in deeper than this trick will address.

OK, you want to try this, then?

Copy/paste the project into a new project.

Click on the timeline, ctrl-A (select all), ctrl-C (copy)

File/New Project

Click on timeline, ctrl-V (paste).

If you're lucky, the project will paste in and will work.

If you're NOT lucky, then clear out the new project (or create a NEW new project), and copy your original project in "chunks"

File/Open (open old project)

Select and copy a chunk from the timeline

File/Open (open new project)

Move scrubber to the end of the video on the timeline (if it isn't there already, like it will be when it's first opened) and paste

File/Save As (e.g. "myfile_1", "myfile_2", etc.)

File/Open (open old project) and repeat copying in "chunks" until you've populated the new project with as much of the timeline as will copy over easily.

What you've stumbled into is one of the reasons that in Studio, it's sometimes better to "work in chapters" -- make your video in sections, render each section out as a DV AVI file, and then make a final project that'll assemble those DV AVI files into final (e.g. DVD-ready) output.   And don't forget to, every so often, do a "File/Save As" to save "checkpoints" to a new file (e.g. "myfile_chapter1_1", "myfile_chapter1_2") -- that way, if Studio eats your project (as it's trying to do to this one), you have a recent checkpoint to fall back to.

Good luck, and keep us informed of your (hopeful) progress.

BittMann

Upon trying the lucky method, I discovered I couldn't copy the whole video at all. Discouraged, I tried your chunks method.

Lo and behold! Chunks have prevailed! I've successfully been able to salvage most of my video into a new *editable* project.

People like you deserve awards. But I don't have one for you, only a huge

THANK YOU!