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Using Media Manager to ‘Make Offline’ it re-names media files to ‘Trashes’ etc
My director always has a complete copy of our film’s media files on his ‘home set-up’ (FCP 5.0 on a Powerbook with 2 x 500gb firewire drives) so he can look at our cuts at home. This has caused problems in the past with firewire drives expiring or failing to mount: making the whole process pointless. He also complained that as the amount of footage increased he struggled to find space for the 6-8 drives he required. My solution was to down-convert all our DV resolution media files to Photo-Jpeg resolution which allowed me to fit 3TB of footage onto 2 brand new G-Tech drives. Every time I sent him a cut to view all I had to do was use media manager to make the sequence offline and convert it using exactly the same Photo-Jpeg settings. All he has to do is reconnect the sequence to his drives at his end.
A wonderful plan except when you came to reconnecting. I found that 95% of clips connect perfectly and then you get asked for the location of a media files called ‘Trashes’ ‘Applications’ or more commonly, ‘Private’. Obviously no such files existed – I use an impeccably organised and structured filename system. Therefore it made random clips in my sequence impossible to reconnect once it had been converted to the settings used by the director.
When this only happened once or twice I thought I could easily just work out what files it was actually looking for by the clip names on the timeline and tell FCP to reconnect to the correct file by ignoring the file name but this is so time consuming and impractical when you have 20/30 clips that have been renamed on a sequence. It is also not the sort of thing my director is technically capable/willing to do.It also seems to be happening when you convert things in the other direction. When I took a sequence from the director’s project and brought it back onto my system by converting his sequence to my DV-PAL settings we got the same problems with ‘Private and ‘Applications’ clips. And we know for sure that all of these clips were online on his computer.
Has anyone seen this before or know any steps I could take to prevent it happening.
I fear that if I can’t get this method to work I will have to give him full resolution media to work with and I will be fated to spend the rest of my days replacing. smashing or swearing at firewire drives that only work when they feel like it.
Anybody got any ideas.
Cheers
Paul -
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