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Clips Won’t Reconnect, Pointing to Alias’s
Thank you for any help you can provide. I am working in Final Cut X 10.1 with a friend who directed his first short and we have run into a media management issue.
The director and I took a Final Cut X 10.1 project library that was created and started on his MacBook laptop’s boot drive and moved it to an external G drive so that we can open it and work on the Mac computers in my office.
When we opened the project up on the mac tower many files did not reconnect. We relinked as much as possible but some of the files will not relink.
When you right click on the file and hit “reveal in finder” it shows the files are being sourced from an alias that is stored in the original media folder of the library in place of an actual media file.
The alias’s have names like “2014-06-16 16_43_20 (id)”. When you click on them it says that the original item can not be found.
He says that he went and changed a lot of the names of the files, but I am concerned that these files were linked to on input by clicking “leave files in place” instead of “copy to library”.
Is this correct? Why are these “id” aliases in the original media folder instead of the actual files? If it helps he also pluraleyes’d all of the footage and exported an xml from pluraleyes to this library.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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4 Replies
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Yes. If there are aliases in the bundle, then the media is elsewhere. He’s externally managing the media, which is generally what you want. Even if you did copy the media with the library, you’d have to relink. The best method would be to copy and consolidate to the new drive from within X, then the files would already be linked to the copied media.
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[William Chilcoat] “The alias’s have names like “2014-06-16 16_43_20 (id)”. When you click on them it says that the original item can not be found.”
These are likely files that were rewrapped off of a media card by FCPX, hence the file name.
You would need access to those rewrapped files or the original media card so that you could reimport.
Jeremy
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I’ve ran into this a few times and even after finding the originals, the re-linking is stubborn.
I’ve had better luck just re-importing the files and honestly a few times it just linked on its own. -
The Library wasn’t consolidated before being moved to another computer. If you right-click on your copy of the Library and select Show Package Contents > (project name) > Original Media and look at the icons and you see a hooked arrow in the lower left corner of any icon, then that is a reference file to the original media (media that’s not managed) and not the actual media. Unless you also moved the external, referenced media to the new computer then the copied Library (now away from the original computer) will be unable to re-link to media that is not there.
When you move a Library to another computer you must either Consolidate it first and then copy it to another drive or copy it first but while the copy is still connected to the first computer, consolidate the copy while it can still find the files on the first computer.
If you don’t consolidate then remember to also copy the media external to the Library to the drive that will walk out the door so that the copied Library will be able to find it later when not connected to the first computer.
If you consolidate, then before you disconnect the copy drive, show package contents of the copied Library > (project name) > Original Media and make sure no hooked-arrow icons are present. That will tell you that you have all your media inside the copied Library.
You should know that the latest Final Cut is great at relinking clips. Much improved since you only have to point to a hard drive and if that hard drive has your media anywhere then Final Cut will find it.
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