Final Cut Express and Aperture

Not sure where this past week went. At least in terms of this blog. Wrapped shooting for Ron Johnson’s thesis film ‘The Caustic Sky’ yesterday. It’s going to be an epic film. And I spent the night in Tom Brown Park last night creating a time lapse of the night sky. More to come on both of those later.

Right now I want to highlight a malfunction that I’ve discovered involving Final Cut Express 4 and Aperture 3. It could very well affect earlier versions too, but these are the versions I have. With lots of photographers migrating and integrating video into their work, I know a lot of people who has gone ahead and gotten FCE. Hopefully I can save some people some headaches and tears.

The situation – You have Aperture installed on your computer, and decide to install Final Cut Express as well. You install FCE, and everything goes well. Then you go to open Aperture, and receive this error message.

Basically, when you just installed FCE, it deleted some very important files for Aperture. Annoying, yes. Unfixable? No.

This is actually a very easy fix, provided you keep time machine backups. Simply go into time machine, and locate this folder in your hard drive:

Macintosh HD > Library > Frameworks > PluginManager.framework > Versions

Just go back to before you installed FCE, and restore the missing files. It should be a folder named “A”, a folder named “B”, and a folder named “Current.”

Voila! Aperture works again.

UPDATE: If you don’t have a time machine backup, here’s a zip of the files you need – Versions (Zip File)