NEWB FCPX Question! Saving Project to a shared server.

[Tom Wolsky]

This is a different application on a completely different foundation.

All the best,

Tom

“Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press
Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2012 “Complete Training for FCPX” from Class on Demand

[Jeff Kirkland]

Or to put it this way, FCPX supports SAN but not plain vanilla NAS. FCPX projects and events have to be located in specific folders either in the root of an external drive or in your user’s Movies folder. FCPX does not support network volumes other than those that are part of a SAN.

You can work around it to a degree by storing events and projects in something like a dmg and mounting that from the server.

Jeff Kirkland | Southern Creative Media
video * audio * post * production
Melbourne, Australia

[Andreas Kiel]

Jeff’s suggestion is the only way to work with drives on a server which are not part of a SAN or locally connected.

There are 2 options (using DiskUtitlity):
1) Create a read/write dmg which will fit your project size — with enough space left for some changes.
2) Create a sparseimage with a size which will allow to do a lot of changes.

Both of them behave like a disk. If the disk is full — no way to add files or make changes!
The sparseimage though is a bit bit different from the dmg, it can grow or shrink. This can save some disk space on the network drive for finished projects.
But again: there must be enough free space on the network drive!

Here a simple example for a dmg/sparseimage:
In DiskUtility create a new “Blank Disk Image”.
Set a name both for the saved image file and the name of the disk. The entry for the “Save As” holds the name of the created file in Finder, the “Name” is the name of the disk displayed in Finder and FCPX when it’s mounted.
Now enter the size with the custom settings — for example 5G for a mini project.
Select the type: “read/write disk image” or “sparse disk image”
Save.
The dmg will cover 5G of disk space. The sparseimage about 500 MB — as long as it’s an empty sparseimage.
Both options will take a while to create the images depending on their size.
Once done they will automatically show up in FCPX and you can duplicate/save a project to those disk images.
In both cases you should use the copy the original files and not only the references.

You even can create new events or projects on this ‘virtual’ disk(s). But it’s not recommended from my point of view.

If you’re working with Lion (or above) the image will mount automatically if the network connection is available. But you can change that in the System Preferences.

Another off topic note (or recommendation):
You should save an XML of the project, then use my MTT app to collect used FX and create a backup installer for those FX used. Though the app doesn’t handle all commercial FX it will give you a survey about what’s missing or not — in case you want to use the images on another machine or a ‘freshed up‘ machine.
MTT is free. https://www.spherico.de/filmtools/MTT/index.html

Hope this helps

-Andreas

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

[Devon Farrell]

Thanks Andreas. Very useful.

[Andreas Kiel]

Devon,

I took the time to make a little GUI app which makes things easier.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/11219

-Andreas

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