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Media Manager Disaster….
Ok – been working on a doc film on nights & weekends for a LONG time now… things just seem to keep going wrong. A few months ago our editor became very ill, so we took the drives over to our place so we could still do some editing done and not lose too much time. Last week, we got a new huge external firewire 800 drive – cool I thought we can now move all the stuff to 1 drive – rather than have it spread over 2 different firewire & 1 sata (all external)….
So I do a finder level copy of all the stuff – literally 1000’s of gigs. Turn off old drives, open FCP – select everything and ‘reconnect media’ easy-peasy… find the clip, connect all in path…. think, prepare for display… shoot – render files on the other other drive, no problem – day is almost over, select all – render all go home….
Next day I hit the space bar to watch a few second…. totally screwed… all the clips are wrong, all the photos are wrong (the pan & scan moves are right but on the wrong pics), i check a file reconnect it again… I need to have ‘Reel 1 Jan’ i connect it, but FCP put ‘Reel 32 Fred’ in the spot… and so on all throughout the 88 minute project.. ok not ALL, I’d say about 35% is properly hooked up? Same thing with music & photos… looking for track 23, connect i to track 23, timeline shows it as track 23, but it sounds just like track 3…
Lucky me, I still have the old drives, and I did a ‘save as’ so I can go back to the old version and drives… but I am really curious as to what is up? Any thought? ideas?
Thanks,
Harry.Forum Cowmunity Leader: Indie & Doc
Forum Cowmunity Leader: HDVDual 1.8 G5 ** 1GB ** 10.4.8 (Office / Photoshop)
Dual 2.0 G5 ** 4GB ** 10.4.8 Kona 2 (FCP Machine) -
5 Replies
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Yea, that’s a messy situation to be in. What would be ideal is to copy your media into 3 folders on the new drive (1 folder per old media drive). And then re-connect media based on drive. So only select the clips to re-connect that were originally on drive 1, then do drive 2, then 3. We had the same situation coming from 5 FW drives to our Xsan for a huge project – but as long as you take it slow, it should all reconnect fine end-of-day.
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You can use the ‘move’ function of the media manager for this. Plug in your new drive to all the old ones, make sure nothing is selected in the browser, select the media manager, choose move and point the media destination to your new firewire drive. You can even include the render files.
Jeremy
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Hope your editor has recovered well from his illness.
I think when you did the finder-based copying that might have fouled it up since FCP is looking for media on specific hard drives. By pointing at different hard drives it might have connected to media with similar names but with radically different content. Just my guess.
I’ve used media manager a lot with FCP 5.1.2 and hadn’t had any serious problems with it so far.
Here’s some possibly helpful suggestions:
Use Media Manager to make the copy to the new drives.
Make sure all the original drives are mounted and that your project is working properly.
Then use Media Manager to consolidate all the material to the new drives. Base the new file names on the old file names and not the clip names.
You have the option of deleting unused media, but in your case you might not want to do that yet.
Also, I’m using hot-swappable SATA drive systems from Firmtek for all my storage. Initial price is competitive with Firewire drives but in a very short period of time that gets a whole lot cheaper. Especially if you need to store a LOT of data.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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Very misleading title Harry. It should have read “Failure to use Media Manager Disaster”
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[Michael G] “Very misleading title Harry. It should have read “Failure to use Media Manager Disaster””
So true! Media Manager would’ve averted disaster. I’ve been using it for years without a problem, in very complicated situations. Yet I continue to see posts about alleged Media Manager disasters. User disasters would be more accurate. ;O)
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