Exporting list of missing files

[Michael Crochetiere]

Thanks – I’ll have a look!

[Andreas Kiel]

[Joe Marler on FCP.co] Andreas, thanks for this. Here are some examples to illustrate how useful this utility is:

Scenario 1: You have a portable drive containing a non-managed library and media set you want to send a remote collaborator. IOW the media is external, not in the library. You obviously don’t want to ship the drive then find it didn’t contain all the media, forcing you to ship another drive (because the assets are too large for file transfer).

While the FCPX library inspector will show you IF assets are on another volume, it does not show you which ones. There is no easy way to locate these. Andreas’ utility does that quickly and easily. It ensures the drive you ship contains 100% of all media assets — the first time.

True, FCPX can consolidate media from one non-managed location to another, then you’re guaranteed that new media tree contains everything. That works for small cases. My current documentary library is 20 terabytes. I don’t have the time or disk space to copy that to another array, simply because FCPX failed to provide any way to list what media files are on what volume. By contrast Andreas’ utility works in real-world production situations, not just for “toy” libraries.

Scenario 2: At the start of post production, you and a remote collaborator both have hard drives with the same media assets. The remote editor needs to send you the library, event or project XML for color correction or audio. Unfortunately the remote editor has added more media assets but didn’t put them all in a known location. They are fatigued, have been working 18 hr a day, and can’t remember if every file was ingested from a designated media tree. Typically they send a project XML file, you load it, see red thumbnails and spend lots of time on the phone trying to isolate which files those are.

Andreas’ utility allows the remote editor to simply send a library, event or project XML file which you then compare with your own version, and it flags any media file differences. IOW it is an FCPX library/event/project “diff” utility. It can compare a project to a library and find any media files referenced by the project that are not in the library and export a list of these.

Thus you can provide the remote editor a list of newly-added media files they need to send you — all in a single step. No time spent on the phone tracking down missing files. You could also send your library XML to the remote editor and they could use the utility on their end to isolate these stray files before sending them.

I have previously spent precious hours In time-critical post production situations tracking down files. If a drive is shipped without containing all the media, this could easily cost 1-2 more days while the files are located and another drive is shipped.

If everyone exercised perfect procedures on media files, you wouldn’t need this utility. But in the real world that does not always happen, so the utility helps in those situations. That is a lot of cases. It probably has additional uses I haven’t even figured out yet. Thanks again to Andreas for taking time to create such a valuable tool.

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

\”He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.\” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil