FCP X Media Management Nightmare!

[Ryan Holmes]

Your problem seems to be more tied to FCPX than to a DSLR. You’ll probably get a better response or feedback if you post this in the FCPX forums:
https://forums.creativecow.net/finalcutprox
or
https://forums.creativecow.net/fcpxtechnique

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Lucas Barros]

Isn’t this the FCPX forum?
Man…this sleepless night really got to me.

Txs a lot 😀

Lucas de Barros
http://www.novelofilmes.com.br

[Ryan Holmes]

No problem.

When in doubt just start clicking and typing till something happens! 🙂

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Bret Williams]

Yes. This is the FCP X techniques forum. Not sure what Ryan is smoking. 😉

[Lucas Barros]

Txs Bret, I was starting to think that I was the one that had smoked something in my – outta – sleep!
😀

Lucas de Barros
http://www.novelofilmes.com.br

[James Cude]

“Put the clips on a timeline each at a time, conformed them to the realtime speed and exported into individual clips.”

Why not just edit at the shooting speed and use the Retime tool to conform instead of creating all new media and losing a generation? Also are you sure you reconnected back to the exports and not the original camera clips?

[Ryan Holmes]

[Bret Williams] “Not sure what Ryan is smoking. ;)”

Only the good stuff!

This thread first appeared on the Canon DSLR forum (and still lives there):

https://forums.creativecow.net/canonmarkii
Original thread: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/21006?wfid=325

I’m guessing the admins saw it and moved it over to the appropriate forum. No harm. No foul. I just knew the DSLR people were probably not the best people to address a FCPX media management issue.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Bret Williams]

I figured as much.

[Bill Davis]

So let me try to break this down and see if I understand what you did.

You had a whole bunch of clips that needed all sorts of different processing as to speed and timing.

So you did some kind of “clip conform” (which, BTW, might have been largely unnecessary in X) to output them as NEW clips. What type of clips were those? Still H264 100mbps DSLR encodes? Did you transcode to ProRes? WHAT did you save them out as?

It’s important because then you detached them from the originals by exporting then as new clips X will have no linkage to the original files it’s expecting. SO you’ve CUT a link there.

And then it sounds like you’ve re-imported the same footage a second time.

Fine, now you have all new clips. But linked to which Event? The original one? A new one? It’s important to know.

In whatever Event you appear to have made a multi-clip from these new clips. So whatever reference pointers there were to the original camera masters are now cut? And do we presume you have NEW links to footage of an unknown type?

But unless you created a whole new Event when you re-imported, your Event is now populated with BOTH references to the New imports – as well as the OLD imports.

You did a bunch of work. And X was happy, because all the pointers were to two batches of clips that it UNDERSTOOD the locations and links to.

Then you did the OOPs – and ALL the links got trashed.

And one among a lot of issues is that to bring back that original edit, you’ve kinda got to re-create ALL the links since the database in X wants to be ready and able to reference all the stuff you’ve told it you want to reference – even tho by exporting your “pre-comps” you ACTUALLY had a decision point as to whether to also cut off your initial EVENT and do a fresh one, or keep working in the original one that had all the links to the original DSLR files.

Or did I get this wrong? I’m haviing a bit of trouble following your workflow. So please let us know what you imported, when, how many or how few events you linked things to, and what types of transcoding you did along the way.

Without that, it’s gonna be pretty hard to help you try to get to where you’re going. At least for me. Because I’m not at all clear on how you actually got from point A to point B.

I’m not following your metadata flow very well at all. And since that’s how X does everything – it’s a bit tough to analyze where the problems might be.

I’ll keep watching and hopefully can help when I understand better what happened.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Lucas Barros]

Here it goes:

[Bill Davis] “So you did some kind of “clip conform” (which, BTW, might have been largely unnecessary in X) to output them as NEW clips. What type of clips were those? Still H264 100mbps DSLR encodes? Did you transcode to ProRes? WHAT did you save them out as?”
Yeah, I did the conforming and exporting because I wanted to have clips all synced to the music and we shot in diferent speeds on camera. As I wanted to do the multicam clip to edit easier I figured out that exporting ProRes clips and creating proxys would be the only/best way of editing the multicam without lagging.
I didn’t try to do a multicam with the original conformed clips tho.

[Bill Davis] “And then it sounds like you’ve re-imported the same footage a second time.
Fine, now you have all new clips. But linked to which Event? The original one? A new one? It’s important to know.”
Right again, reimported them into the same event – they are new clips so I figured it wouldn’t make a difference. Created a Multicam clip with the 12 of them and did a proxy of the MC clip to edit.

So, editing with the proxys was great, I did the first cut I posted in the link etc… all good.
Then came the “oops” part.
But what I can’t understand is why would FCPX put all the clips in the trashbin. Thats a NO/NO for me.

What happened was that all my clips were offline and the MC clip was still on the Event, but blacked out.
I could see the cuts and the take names I used tho, so what I did was reimport the ProRes clips, make a new MC clip, put on top of the first one on the Event and go cut by cut checking which take I had used and clicking on it on the new MC clip (did it make sense now?).

Now it’s all fine, I am kinda back where I was before all this started on the editing/finishing, but I got really scared because it was a simple problem (an offline drive – can happen pretty easily) and FCPX couldn’t handle it.
On FCP Legacy or even Premiere Pro this would be a no brainer to solve (I reckon).

Thanks for your attention!
😀

Lucas de Barros
http://www.novelofilmes.com.br