FCPX – consolidate media does nothing for me

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Kevin Patrick] “I chose to leave the clip on the RAID drive, no copy.
I chose Reveal in Finder and FCPX took me to the folder inside FCPX Events and found the Alias for the clip, as expected.”

That alias IS the media to FCPX. If you want to move the hard copy of the media to somewhere else, you first have to use the “Organize” function to bring a hard copy of the media to the event. You can then consolidate that project to another disk. Get it?

[Kevin Patrick]

The following is from Apple’s FCP X user manual for Consolidate Project Media.

Consolidate a projectʼs media files
In the course of creating a project in Final Cut Pro, you might use media from a variety of locations, including your local computer and external storage devices. If the media used in the project is located on multiple hard disks, you can consolidate all the media used in the project on the same hard disk as the project.

So you’re saying that to FCP X the Alias is the media. Therefore, the Consolidate Project Media function will consolidate Aliases? How (or why) could FCP X consolidate Aliases? If there is no Alias for the Media in the FCP X folder, than FCP X wouldn’t even know about the media.

So if you don’t think Consolidate Project Media will copy or move media (as it states in the manual) what do you think it’s supposed to do? What am I missing?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Kevin Patrick] “So you’re saying that to FCP X the Alias is the media. Therefore, the Consolidate Project Media function will consolidate Aliases?”

That’s sort of what I am saying. That alias is the media in your event. The consolidate function does not consolidate media in to your event. That is the organize function. The consolidate function will simply move events (and the media or connections to original media within them) to another drive.

[Kevin Patrick] “How (or why) could FCP X consolidate Aliases?”

Why did you choose to leave the media where it is instead of bring it in the event in the first place? There is good reason to do this, you just have to understand the entire process. If you want a copy of the media in your event, and not an alias to it, you must bring that media in to the event first using the Organize or Transcode function.

[Kevin Patrick] “If there is no Alias for the Media in the FCP X folder, than FCP X wouldn’t even know about the media. “

Correct.

[Kevin Patrick] “So if you don’t think Consolidate Project Media will copy or move media (as it states in the manual) what do you think it’s supposed to do? What am I missing?”

Just what it says it’s going to do. If you have EVENTS that are spread out across different drives, it will consolidate the event (and media or links to it) to the drive of your choosing, keeping the original event and media structure. If you want to move the media somewhere, you must bring it in to the event first (a real live copy of it, not just a link to it). Making more sense? You do understand how FCPX brings media into events, right? I think that’s what you might be missing. FCPX is doing exactly what you told it to, on original import, you told FCPX to reference your original media (which is puts an alias in the events), then you wanted to move these events to one disk, just like it says.

If you want to bring multiple events in to one event, you would use the merge function.

[Enrique Acevez]

The first thing to consider is that one thing is a project and another an event, this’s the new way to organize files of final cut, an event is what you would call a Project in old final cut pro, and a project in the new Final Cut X is what you would call a in older versions, so starting from this point if you “Consolidate a project” with the “Consolidate media Project” option what final cut X will do is to make sure that the media (aliases or real media files) used in that project are in the same location, for example, suppose you have 2 events called “Holidays” and “Family” each one on separate hard drives and you have one project called “Family Holidays” linked to the Holidays event, for the project you use clips from both events, so in one project you would have clips from different events in separate hard drives, until now everything is ok, but what happens when you want to back up you project “Family Holidays” well you could manually copy the files from one hard drive to the other, or you could “Consolidate media project”, BUT this one is tricky, lets go back a little, IF in your events you have aliases Final Cut X will consolidate Aliases, if you have the original fils it will consolidate the original file, so what does this means, that final cut will move or copy the aliases or file used in your project from both events to the hard drive where is the event that has linked the project. So at the end you ar just moving file or aliases to one location, this is what “Consolidate media project” do.

The diference to “Organize event files” is that this last option will replace the aliase in you event for the real file in you hard drives.

So if you Consolidate you project but you just use clips from one event or many events in the same hard drive you will get the error “Nothing to Consolidate The selected project and the Events it refers to are already in the same location.”

Final Cut X can work with just the aliases and don’t need to copy files or move the media so you can have al your media in a high-capacity hard drive like a server and you don’t need to full the HD of your computer with tons of videos and several people can use the files from a server for example, and the only thing you need to back up your project is to take al your aliases with you to any where you want, then, put them back in your computer with final cut or any other computer and the alias will still work.

So I hope this clears up a bit your doubts, is really tricky, but when you get to understand it is an easier and automatic way to organize your files.

Hi5 all.

[Colin Ryan]

I am coming across this same issue. Fortunately the project I’m working on i will probably never have to reference again. Here is what i did. Right click on the project you want to consolidate in the project library – Duplicate Project or highlight the project and command D. Pick the 3rd option and it will create a new event with only the clips you used. That was helpful for me because i keep all my light leaks and transitions in other events. So if you have clips from multiple events it will grab all of them and put them all in a new event. The duplicate project will have (fcp1) after its name. I copied the new event folder and new project folder to my backup external. Then from within FCPX delete the events and projects. I opened up the event & project on another computer and it was fine except for a difference in plugins. I reopened it on my computer and it worked fine. This is the way it worked for me, that doesn’t mean i will not be crossing my fingers each time.

let your fingers do the walking