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Saving Projects Properly
There are times when I have saved a project to desktop and backup and shut down the Mac. When I turn the computer back on and try to find the project, sometimes it is partially or even completely gone. I usually do a Save As in both Hard Drives. Can anyone help me?
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14 Replies
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Sounds like Save As is causing you problems. At the beginning of a project, Save your project. This will set off the AutoSave feature in FCP. Make sure your Autosave Vault is set to a drive other than your system drive.
Create an FCP Projects folder on your system drive to save your projects to. I wouldn’t recommend your desktop.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
Save as is not how you should save projects to another location. That will screw you up faster than a whirling Dervish on meth. Just save all your projects to a single location, the copy and paste to other locations for backup.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Thank you for your response Dave. I believe I’ve created my AutoSave Under the Systems Settings/ Search Options tab directly into my Mac HD. Then I can copy/ paste the Project to my BackUp External HD. Does that sound correct? It has been a source of great disruption, as you can imagine. I also wonder which HD to use for capturing my DV. I’ve had conflicting recommendations.
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Thank You Steve. I believe I set up my AutoSave to my Mac HD in The System Settings/Search Folder of FCP. Then I can copy/paste the project to my Backup HD. Does this sound correct?
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Mr. Weiss,
While I normally agree with your sage advice, in this case I must respectfully disagree.
When you say, ” Save as… That will screw you up faster than a whirling Dervish on meth.” I have NOT found that to be the case. We use “save as” on a regular basis and have NOT found it to be a problem.
Here’s what we do.
Start project: Name it “My Project”. This becomes the “Base” project.
Every day, at the end of the day, we “save as” but append a date to it. So tomorrow’s work would be “My Project 2-13”, the day after, “My Project 2-14” etc. That way you have an instant archive tree that you can navigate back to if something goes wrong. These “save as” are done to THREE places: Locally (media drive) globally (shared Storage) and “Mobililly” to a USB thumb drive. There is NO excuse for lost work.
If you lose your work it’s YOUR fault, not FCP.I agree that the desktop is NOT the proper place to save ANYTHING.
Mark
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[Mark Raudonis] “While I normally agree with your sage advice, in this case I must respectfully disagree.”
Actually Mark, we don’t really disagree on this one… Your method is a very nice method that in fact circumvents some/most/all of the issues with using “Save as,” while achieving some additional goodness for a big facility like yours, where consistent practices and workflows are essential.
My problem with “Save As” stems from issues created accidentally by individual users updating a single project without updating the date each time they create a new version. If not used wisely and judiciously, Save As often winds up creating a zillion similarly named projects, each of which simply has the word “copy” attached one more time than the previous version, which ultimately leads to users completely losing track of which version resides where on their system, and leads to multiple revisions on multiple timelines that often become very difficult to mitigate.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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I always save my project file to the same folder and drive as my media. That way everything is in the same master folder for that project and I don’t lose anything. I also back everything up to a second drive as well.
Apple Certified Master Pro FCS 2
Sony EX-3
MacBook Pro -
I usually keep my current PROJECT file on my desktop and backups on other drives.
Why is it such bad news to keep a project file on the desktop? I didn’t know this …
Best
Harry.
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Desktop = system drive.
Opening and using the FCP project from your desktop means that you’re taxing the system drive for BOTH system resources AND FCP project data. It’s not an ideal situation. Chances are you can get away with it, but if you ever start experiencing poor performance, this may be the cause.
Best practices are to separate the the system drive from everything else. Ideally, your project would be saved and read off of any other drive available.
Mark
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I never thought of that. Thanks.
Do you think that it would be better to keep the Project file on the same drive as the media or on a totally different (third) drive?
Many thanks for the reply.
Harry.
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