Final Cut Pro 3 and Final Cut Express 1.x: "An error occurred finding one or more of the specified capture scratch volume(s)" Alert

When using Final Cut Pro 3 or Final Cut Express with some versions of Mac OS X, having a solidus ("/"), or "forward slash character" in clip or pathnames can set scratch disk paths to invalid locations, causing unexpected behavior during capture.

Symptom

An alert box with this message appears:

Figure 1 Final Cut Pro alert box

Solution

For Mac OS X 10.2
Update to Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later. Use the Software Update preferences or search at the Apple Downloads page (http://www.info.apple.com/support/downloads.html).

For Mac OS X 10.3
Do one of the following:

Upgrade to Final Cut Pro 4 or Final Cut Express 2.
Avoid using the solidus in clip names, or any part of the path to the clip including the hard drive name. If you have already tried to capture a clip with a solidus in the name and the alert box above appeared, you should delete it from the clip name and capture the clip again.

If you are using Cinema Tools for Final Cut Pro, you should also ensure that your telecine logs do not contain a solidus in clip names. You may want to use a word processor to replace all occurrences of "/" with another character such as "-". TextEdit, which comes with Mac OS X, can help you do this.