Consolidation duplicates files

[Joe Marler]

If media is imported from a camera card (or on-disk camera folder tree) and the import does not finish, you may see red/black clips and the error “referencing media on the camera”. Ben Halsall discusses this in the below video.

The reconnect and consolidation may have caused duplicates due to the previous clips already imported. E.g in Finder if you start a folder copy, then abort it, then re-do it, there will be duplicate clips.

For tree-format media which disallows import with “leave files in place”, my suggestion is re-wrap that with EditReady2, then import with “leave files in place”. The re-wrap does not transcode so it’s very fast: https://www.divergentmedia.com/editready

This also allows you to retain control over the on-disk file structure and file names. With copy-style ingest, FCPX manages that (either inside the library or in a designated storage location), and it will rename the files and use its own folder structure.

When importing with “leave files in place”, I strongly recommend first renaming the files to ensure they are globally unique. This avoids other problems which can happen if loading an XML. It also makes subsequent management of the dataset easier, since each filename is unique across all endeavors. My team does this by appending a 5-digit unique, incrementing serial number to the camera filename.

“Final Cut Pro X Tutorial: Fixing Missing Clips on the Timeline – Import Issue Fix”: https://youtu.be/NRNoReJbVoA

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[Jiri Fiala]

Thank you! I wanted to retain as much easy re-connectability from the original tree folders (stored in the broadcast facility) as possible, so I just imported directly, but I’ll probably rewrap with EditReady. Still, duplication when consolidating seems like a bug, especially with FCPX which is extremely sensitive to proper media (with its UUIDs, requirements for exactly same audio/video channel configuration…).

[Joe Marler]

[Jiri Fiala] “I wanted to retain as much easy re-connectability from the original tree folders (stored in the broadcast facility) as possible,”

You cannot reconnect to already-imported tree-format media since the only allowed import is via copy within library or other designated location specified by the FCPX library inspector>Storage Location>Modify Settings>Media.

During the import FCPX will reorganize and often rename the files to a sparse group of folders. To handle filename collisions it will append (fcp1), etc. to some files. After that, any link to the original tree-format media tree is gone — the data has been restructured by FCPX during the ingest.

Once the “copy”-style import is done, the files should be within the library or designated storage location. If you abort the copy (which is easy to do — just moving the cursor may pause it, as shown in the above video), then all media has not been imported, but is split between the partial content in the library and the import source.

In that case the solution NOT to consolidate, but as shown in the above video: re-connect the media source, select the red/black clips or those with a camera icon on them, then do File>Import>Reimport from Camera/Archive.

People frequently encounter problems with this area. IMO it’s best to bypass these issues by re-wrapping tree-format media with EditReady2 and import with “leave files in place”. It is faster, less confusing, maintains a small “lean” library, and gives you (not FCPX) control over your media folder structure and filenames.

Also do not copy the bare video files out of the media tree and import those. In some cases like Sony XAVC-S you can get away with it. In other cases like AVCHD it will cause major I/O performance problems.