Final Cut Pro X – finding previous Final Cut Projects after a disc reorganise!

[T. Payton]

So these projects you want to find, are they in iMovie of FCP X?

Actually regardless of the App, they both will store projects/events in two types of locations:

– Startup Drive. A users Movies folder. iMovie Projects, Final Cut Events or Final Cut Projects
– Other drives: At the root of the drive, iMovie Projects, Final Cut Events or Final Cut Projects

If they are not there, they were apparently moved so just search for those and you’ll find em.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Stephen Cronk]

Hi Timothy

Sorry it’s taken a while for me to get back on this.

For some reason I can see iMovie Projects, Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects but not the projects I’m looking for. I may have sent them straight to Compressor and on to YouTube as I have the .mov versions but it’s just i can’t find the Final Cut Pro versions anywhere!

Thanks for your help.

Regards, Stephen

[T. Payton]

I’ve been there. I would encourage you now to figure out a workflow and archive strategy for projects moving forward. Here is what we do at our shop:

1-All jobs are assigned a job number and we name events & projects with this job number.

2-Media Archive Drive – (bare sata internal 3.5″ drives using a esata docking station). All media that is shot is dumped on this media archive. We don’t work off of it just dump our footage to it as a backup. Once a drive is full, we increment the number and grab another drive.

3- Work RAID – we store our projects & events on a RAID, copying all files to the FCP Events Folders (we are a small shop so we only have one). We also store “Job Folders” for each project which includes photoshop files, scripts, check movies, After Effects documents and renders, etc.

4- External Edit Drives – (FW800 drives) if we need to edit offsite, or shuttle around a project – we copy and event from our RAID to a shuttle, edit right on the shuttle and transfer back to the RAID for finishing

5 – Project Archives – (bare drives with docking station) once a project is completed and the job is closed, we move it to a our Job Archive Drives until they are full. We make 2 copies of this archive, one we bring offsite, another we keep onsite.

We have a naming convention for each type of folder associated with a project:

Assigned job number and Name –> 11-MBI-102 Promo Video
media archive –> 11-MBI-102_O Promo Video
event –> 11-MBI-102_E Promo Video
project –> 11-MBI-102_P Promo Video
job folder –> 11-MBI-102_D Promo Video

That way when they are dumped onto an archive, and we need to figure out what happened 4 year ago, we can easily find out.

I hope this helps. Bummer you can’t go back in time. 😉

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque