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Feature request on how FCP handles media linking… what do you think?
On more than one occasion I’ve had the need to work on a single project at work and at home with media that resided in both places – originally the media was captured at work at sits on the SAN and at home I copied the media over to either an external or internal drive so when I did jump back and forth everything was in both locations.
The problem, as I’m sure some of you have experienced with set ups like this, is that as soon as I need to stop working from work and start working at home, when I open the project at home all the media is disconnected and I need to reconnect everything manually. Once I was working on a trailer for a documentary with over 140 hours of DV footage – so even though reconnecting has become second nature to me… we were still talking about an average of 5-10 minutes sometimes to do this process. Then when I saved and went back to work to continue… I had to do the whole process all over again.
I think it would be great if you could somehow tell Final Cut a backup directory or place to look for media, or if Final Cut could remember all the locations of media that it’s ever seen and if it can’t find media where it thinks it should be, it looks in a secondary directory. To me it’s definitely possible for the program to be able to do this.. it’s just a matter of how it’s implemented. Has anyone ever figured out a workaround for this problem and maybe I’ve just never tried something that could be done? I don’t think this sort of thing could be handled by a third party plug in or program but maybe it’s possible? Something that just popped into my head that I’ve never tried and don’t even know would work – but would it be possible to create aliases that link to the quicktimes in the same directory on both machiens (say… “Macintosh HD > Aliases”) so that Final Cut would never see a disconnect happening regardless of what computer one is on?
Just throwing this out there. Thanks for the responses. Peace!
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Paul Escandon
Producer | Director | Editor
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
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Adjunct Professor of Media
John Paul the Great Catholic University -
4 Replies
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If you have everything named exactly the same, this should go away.
For example name your home computer hard drive the same and name your scratch drive the same as the SAN.
Jeremy
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And the file structure must match as well. Might be a bit difficult with a SAN and home drive.
Shane
Littlefrog PostGETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
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Paul,
We’ve been working with an editor in another time zone for years. Her “local” drive has the exact same name as our SAN (and matching file structure as Shane points out). The media is an exact duplicate, and therefore, all she sends back and forth is a project with ONLY the current sequence. This works very well without much effort to reconnect.
Your feature suggestion is interesting. However, I’d rather Apple spent their time and resources getting certain aspects of the media manager working better before tackling something that already has a viable workaround (common drive names).
Mark
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Agreed, but fixing this problem will help to move FCPs media management along.
Jeremy
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