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How does FCPX handle relinking project media (moving between computers)
Was given a project with about 3tb of footage, worked on it for a few days just fine, but my mac had a bad crash and some files were corrupted. “Not so bad!” I thought “I got the original hard drive to copy from” I thought feeling like a real smart a**. Only when I right clicked on my media to see where it was saved, It kept opening the external hard drive location and not from my raid box.
So in a panic, I unmounted the hard drive that was shipped to me with the original media and tried again, this time it pulled up my local copy. I swapped out the bad files, and loaded up my project again to find that the media was red, but still worked. No waveform, but the audio was there and could be edited. It even exported properly. But when I plug the original hard disk back in, I get waveforms again.
I mean, everything worked out fine and I guess I should consider myself lucky, but I don’t really understand what Final cut is thinking. Why would it behave this way and if i really wanted my waveforms back, does anyone know what I can do?
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4 Replies
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FCXP relinking is usually ok as long the file it’s relinking to is identical to the one that’s missing. I’m not sure what was happening in your case but I’m wondering of you deleted all the render files? My first guess would be that there was something in the render cache that was referring to the external hard drive rather than the files you just reconnected.
Just a guess though…
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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
I hadn’t deleted anything. I’m new to FCPX so I wouldn’t know what to trash after a crash like the one I had. I just thought it was interesting that when the hard drive was connected, it not only knew to take that path, but seemed happier using that media. Even though the files were (or at least, should be) all the same.
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[Brandon Lanski] “Why would it behave this way and if i really wanted my waveforms back, does anyone know what I can do?”
You need to relink your media using this procedure: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12701?locale=en_US
Just answering the prompt about media location is not sufficient if the folder names or folder structure is different.
If it’s not relinked you can get cases where some files are present and others are red (missing). This often happens with audio files. E.g, if you have proxies the video will still show up in proxy mode (even with missing or restructured media folders), but there’s no such thing as audio proxies so they will be red.
If the audio played but clips were red that might be an issue with waveform generation, or the waveform cache doesn’t match the replaced audio files. Again the solution is relink everything.
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Like I said, FCPX hard codes the location of everything and is really fussy about what it considers the same file to be. The waveforms it generated and cached were associated with the clips on the external drive and I guess it just needed a kick to know where to look and/or to regenerate the waveform cache again. Even though you’ve just copied the same files to the same place they used to be, if FCPX is showing them as missing or not showing the waveform, I’d relink them – and if that didn’t fix things, I’d try deleting the render and cache files to force FCPX to recreate things again.
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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland
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