Deleting Render Files After Picture is Locked and on DVD

[Shane Ross]

#4 Backing up a finished project.

Shane’s Stock Answer #4:

All you really need to backup are your project file, any music, sound effects and graphics or pictures that were used in your project. The media…the captured material…needn’t be backed up. As long as you have the source tapes and the project file, all you need to do is recapture the material by batch capturing.

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[Christopher Bagnall]

So it is ok to simply “Trash” all of my render files? I remember having the error message “Cannot find “—-FIN” Without this the movie cannot play correctly”. I just want to make sure all my transitions and effects will still be included. Thanks. Sorry for being overly cautious and inquisitive.

[Christopher Bagnall]

So it is ok to simply “Trash” all of my render files? I remember having the error message “Cannot find “—-FIN” Without this the movie cannot play correctly”. I just want to make sure all my transitions and effects will still be included. Thanks. Sorry for being overly cautious and inquisitive.

[Shane Ross]

You need to export a Quicktime Movie…SELF CONTAINED…not a ref movie. If you export a reference movie, it “references” all the media and render files. If they are gone, it won’t work. However, if you export a self contained QT movie, it makes a movie with all the footage in it…self contained.

Then you just toss the Renders folder, the Capture Scratch, Audio Renders…whathaveyou.

Back up all your graphics, music and SFX though…

[Samuel Frazier]

I’ve trashed my render files a few times. It sometimes helps when things are going crazy in FCP. I like to rename my project as I work on it, so I end up with huge amounts of render files. Deleting them is not dangerous as the worst it can do is require you to render the project. Just make sure you have things well organized and are only deleting the render files and you’ll be fine.
There’s also a way to delete all of your project’s captured media and define ‘handles’ say 5 secs before and after your in and out points. But that requires the Media Manager and no one trusts it, so I’d avoid going that route.

[Debe]

[mus man] “But that requires the Media Manager and no one trusts it, so I’d avoid going that route.”

I wouldn’t go that far.

Media Manger is not as intuitive as it should be, and it deals with media in a way that sometimes only makes sense to itself, but if you’re archiving, and you take your time to test the archive before you blow stuff away, Media Manager CAN be a useful tool.

I test mine by making archives on my G5 and then restoring on my G4 laptop. I trust it because this way the G4 has no knowledge of previous incarnations of the project. I’m still using FCP 4.5, but I’ve never had a problem ending up with a solidly archived project. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts, but that’s usually due to pilot error because I can go two or three months before I need to archive and forget to do something like make my sequence clips independent first.

I agree that Media Manger as it is certainly can be made better, but it does function. It just takes hand-holding.

IMHO,

debe

[Chris Poisson]

Christopher,

I’d throw in another idea, if your DVD is approved, and that’s all you’ll need in the future, keeping the mpeg and aiff or whatever assets are all you need. Another thing I often do is make a disk image off the final DVD, and keep that handy to instantly make more copies in Disk Utility.

[Samuel Frazier]

Well, you would definitely know better than I as I’m still pretty green with FCP. I have only really used the Media Manager to make copies NTSC DV (DV25) copies (my “offline”) of 10 bit uncompressed digibeta material (the “online” stuff). That did work fine and I have been able to switch b/t the offline and online many times w/o incident.
I’d love to learn how to use the rest of the media manager w/o mangling things. I’ve bought nearly every FCP DVD tutorial available so I’ll go back over them and see if they have anything on the subject.