Having media on different drive to event file

[Jeff Kirkland]

I can’t see any real advantage and I’d think it would be a recipe for disaster if anything happens that you lose track of the drive with the media on it. In the interests of coming back to a project weeks, months, or years later, I’d definitely want to have my event and the media it refers to in the same spot.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeremy Garchow]

This is a perfectly viable workflow.

You can always, at any time, “Organize” the Event and it will copy all the linked .mov files in to the Event.

A good use of this would be to have the Event on a really fast SSD, and all your media on a slower drive.

The problem is, all render files follow the Event/Project so you might have to trash render files to keep space open on lower capacity SSDs.

Jeremy

[Andreas Kiel]

I’m totally with Jeremy.

It can make perfect sense as you don’t have to juggle with source media — except maybe with media which are copied or converted by FCPX automatically.
So convert the media upfront put it on your RAID and from there create your events and projects. Sounds a bit tedious but makes sense as well.

And make sure to have a backup of your media.

Andreas

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

[Michael Sanders]

Mmmm. I can’t remember the logic now (I came up with the crazy plan at 2am whilst not being able to sleep!). I’ll try and see if I can work it out.

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Bret Williams]

Makes perfect sense. No different than 7 really. 7 always made links to the footge, especially once we quit working with tape. Except for the occasional log and transfer, my capture scratch folders were empty for years.

These days I put everything on a thunderbolt Raid 5. But I figure in the future Ill edit off thunderbolt field drives too, but I’ll still want my projects and events localized. An event might consist of media from many drives and I don’t see the point in consolidating it all until the project is finished.

[Mark Dobson]

[Michael Sanders] “I know X can just link to media but has anyone tried keeping the media on one drive and events on another drive linking between the two?”

This scenario came up on a recent thread on the other Forum.

FCP X crashes on large jobs :

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/47480#47517

In order to avoid problems Mike Fernanandes spreads his FCPX jobs over 3 drives. 1. For FCPX 2. for all his Events and 3. for his media.

I’ve not tried this workflow yet but he claims it really speeds things up.

[Charlie Austin]

[Andreas Kiel] “It can make perfect sense as you don’t have to juggle with source media — except maybe with media which are copied or converted by FCPX automatically.”

ya know what kind of sucks? You can have all your media nicely aliased (not copied to the event) but if you bring in anything from the audio browser tab… It copies it to the event folder! I discovered this the hard way, so beware. :-/

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Bret Williams]

Some of us can only afford 1 pegasus! 🙂

[Bill Davis]

I’ve just spent a week cutting a new project for a client and they wanted to use assets from two programs I did for them about 8 months ago.

So I have a “hybrid” timeline going. Half the clips in my current project live on the firewire 800 external drive – the other half are being sourced from disk images that reside on a mounted external 2TB USB 2.0 drive that contains the disk images of the cards I shot the referenced video on.

When I load up the disk images (double click mount them on the desktop of my laptop) X re-links perfectly and the scenes on my timeline re-connect — and the “offline” markers on my new timeline fill in handily.

It seems that as long as the database in X has a clear path to the assets your X projects and events are calling for – it really doesn’t care overly much where the linked files actually reside.

(It’s surprised me that the files play back perfectly from that USB-2 drive – and I wonder if X is doing some reference movie or maybe proxy access magic under the hood, because I didn’t think USB was fast enough for real-time – but it’s working fine so I’m not messing with it!)

There have been a couple of times that I’ve crashed with X seemingly not being able to “talk” to the drive – but as always, a re-boot gets me back into my project with nothing lost.

So I think X is less sensitive to WHERE assets are stored than I’m accustomed to.

FWIW.

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.

[Don Smith]

Just yesterday I again studied moving and copying Events and Projects.

There’s a big difference between organizing Events and Organizing Projects.

To organize an Event means to copy all external (to the Event) media into the Event.

To organize a Project, it only means to copy related Events (or used media) to same hard drive as where the Project lives.

Someone here suggested that render files are moved to the Event when you organize the Event. I don’t believe that’s true. Render files live in the Project folder.

But, there’s no rule that says you HAVE to organize an Event. For me, I keep things in the finder folder for my project like PowerPoints and Word and Excel documents. If I want an Event and its Projects on the same drive I’ll also manually copy my work folder as well.

Having a Project that draws from multiple Events that live on other or multiple hard drives presents the same conundrum as the argument for multi-engine airplanes; Yes, if one engine goes out then you have a spare that will get you safely down but it can also be said that having two engines doubles the likelyhood of having an engine failure. Now, of course, two engines are better than one but do you really want your Project crippled because drawing from, say, three drives and three Events triples the chance that one of the drives will fail?

Don Smith

NewsVideo.com