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Paring down slow crashing large project
I have a very large FCP 7.06 project that is sooo large that it crashes all the time. It is a documentary project that I have been working on for YEARs and has now grown to almost 400mb. It has about 3 TB of media. I still need all the footage, but I can get rid of many Sequences. Is deleting sequences the best way to cut down on the project size? I have made NEW smaller projects when I am trimming a particular sequence, but if I have to search or find footage that is not in the sequences in the New project, it will not locate (find) the footage. I then try to open up the large 400 mb project and both project crash together. Very frustrating to say the least. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
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2 Replies
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Sequences take up the meat of a project file, not the footage you’ve imported. Separately, simply deleting sequences from a project doesn’t simplify the project file as much as we’d all expect.
I’m hesitant to suggest this because it can become an organizational nightmare, but I’d make a new, empty project and copy over all the media in your browser from your old project. No sequences, just media. Then copy in only the sequence(s) you need to keep editing. This way, you have all your media accessible to search, and can continue to move forward with your edit. Save this as a NEW file, and further I’d suggest saving incrementally to have a non-crashing project to be able to return to easily.
One thing you’ll probably lose (some care, some don’t) are your master clip connections between the clips in your timeline and the master media in your browser, meaning pressing Shift+F on a clip in the timeline won’t show you the master clip in the browser. You can still match frame to get back to your clean source without having to navigate through the browser every time, but if browser organization is the key to all the info relating to your clips (date shot, archive source, etc), you could be opening up a whole new can of worms.
Hope that helps!
Ben
Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films -
Mark,
I have some suggestions for you, but you,ve got to be willing to “think different”. Ready?
First, get rid of the idea that ALL of your media needs to be in a single project… It doesn’t !
Second, use the finder level for organizing your media.
Third, go buy CATdv. If you don’t know about it, there’s a forum for it right here on the cow. Check it out. You can have CATdv and FCP open at the same time. Switch back and forth between the two . Search in CATdv, edit in FCP. Try it. I think you,ll like it.If this isn’t a workable idea, consider multiple projects based on media type: interviews, b-roll, scenes, etc. You can have them all open simultaneously.
Hope this helps.
Mark
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