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Reconnecting – I’m confused
I can’t find a way to make FCP see a relationship between an offline clip in a sequence and an independantly digitised clip with the same reel number and timecode.
Can you reconnect clips from within FCP4.5 without searching through source media clips in Finder with the same corresponding name?
Let’s say I have a sequence with offline clips. In a bin i have a master clip, same reel number and the clip covers all the timecodes of the clips in the offline sequence. The master clip name is different from the clips in the sequence, but it covers the right footage.
So I know that i can reconnect the clips by unchecking “matched name” and picking the source media file in Finder. But what if i have a gazillion master clips with different names to the clips in my sequence (it’s a long story)? Without any better solution, I started to reconnect manually, but i realised it’s extremely dangerous (and time consuming), because several times i’ve selected a source media file i think might correspond, and when i check the sequence the shot A) is the wrong one, and B) suddenly has different in and out codes. Why would it let me do something so wrong?
I couldn’t check the timecodes when selecting the source media clip, so i imported all the clips i had into FCP to see the logging info and am left with online master clips and an offline sequence i know belong to each other but are still unconnected.
How can it be so easy to reconnect to a clip you absolutely do not want? Shouldn’t it use the reel number and timecode reference as well when trying to reconnect? If source media clip names are all it goes by doesn’t it make that useless?
I’m desperate to understand this situation, especially if I’m just being stupid about a very simple thing. Help!
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4 Replies
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Being able to reconnect any media has huge advantages and one of the biggest reasons of why I like FCP so much.
I learned this the hard way too – don’t ever change the names of clips. There’s a nice blank field called “Description” to name and organize your clips. Just use that from now on and leave the actual clip name alone. You run into all kinds of weird problems when the clip name differs from the media file name.
As far as fixing your project, I’m a little overwhelmed by your post. It sounds like you completely lost the relationship between your offline clips and their corresponding media files because you changed the clip names. I know it sucks, but you may be best off just going through one at a time and checking each one. Or just throw away the media and batch capture from tape if you can.
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Yes it took me ages to describe my problem in the least confusing way.
What happened was I inherited the project and had to redigitise 50hrs of logged material. Only, when it was last digitised (and the media subsequently lost) it was digitised across timecode breaks, so when it finally came to me, i found that because of this there was often not enough pre-roll on tapes, and i would have to manually redigitise clips with different in/outs. So anyway, relationship now gone between source media sequence clips. multiply this by many, many timecode dropouts and many manually redidged clips, a re-offlined sequence from someone with new master clips (and names), no more deck available, and you have my sad state of affairs. I just want to cry.
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I hear you. Sounds terrible. Forgive me if you already know this, but you can change the preroll time. I’ve run into this problem before. I changed the preroll to 1 second and it worked. Go into your device control settings.
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Ah yes. I’m wary of 1sec pre-rolls with dv tapes. Plus one logged master clip would turn out to carry up to 3 dropouts, so i’d have to redidge 3 clips, then reconnect those manually. Times a gazillion, as I mentioned. Anyway, I’m really just wallowing in the pain of it all and should move on with my life. Thank you for your prompt responses.
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