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Problem with large project size
I’m working on a very large FCP project (300 megs and counting). It’s a long documentary with over 100 hours of DV digitized, divided into 300 folders for each of the original reels, plus tons of folders organizing those clips in various ways, plus around 12 hours of edited assemblies, and a current rough cut time of 105 minutes (aiming for a final 90 minutes). I haven’t had many problems so far, but recently the timeline mysteriously (to me) dropped a bunch or random clips – maybe something I did, but in any case I’m a bit paranoid about possible problems due to the large size of the project. I made a copy of the project and took out a lot of the folders, which got the size down to about 90 megs. But as I’m editing, I’ll need to have access to some of those files (though don’t know which ones). I’d hoped I would be able to open both projects at the same time, so if I needed to go back to check original reels or early edits I could switch to the longer version of the project and just copy and paste shots/sequences into the smaller project, where I would be working most of the time. But whenever I try to open the second project, FCP crashes.
Any thoughts or suggestions for how to proceed? Thanks for any help.
MacPro 2X3GHz Quad Intel with 8 GB memory, running FCP 6.0.3 on OSX 10.5.6
Tom Valens
Tamalpais Productions -
2 Replies
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Break your project up into multiple projects. One for your sequences, one for your footage, one for your music and sound effects. This way you can have a handful of small projects. That is the beauty of FCP…you can have multiple projects open at once.
I have a tutorial DVD full of this and other organizational tips…if I might be so bold as to try to push it upon you, and anyone who happens to be reading.
https://store.creativecow.net/p/63/getting_organized_in_final_cut_pro
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Thanks for the response, Shane. The problem is, FCP won’t load the second project (usually). I first tried opening a second, earlier version of the project, so I could copy clips from one to the other – FCP crashed (twice). I assumed this was because both projects were so large (300 megs each). So then I made a copy of the project (saved as with a new name), and took out everything except the edits. This got me down to about 100 megs. I loaded the original project again, this time renaming it and taking out everything except the 300 files of original logged clips – this came out to about 110 megs. So now (after restarting the computer to empty RAM) I loaded the edits only project, and then tried to open the project with the logged clips – it started to load the second project, and didn’t crash, but slowed WAY down. I finally cancelled it when after 12 minutes it had only read 22% of the project. (The whole 300 meg project takes about 7 minutes to load). I did try loading the clips only project first, which took about 6 minutes, and then adding the edits only project – this went fairly fast (2 min) and loaded ok. But normally I would only open and work on the edits only project, and add the other condensed versions (clips, assemblies, etc) later if and when needed. My experiences so far don’t give me a lot of confidence that this would work. So for the moment I’m back to editing on the single large original project.
Any further advice or suggestions? (I will get your DVD to check out, but I have the feeling it won’t answer this problem). Thanks again.
Tom Valens
Tamalpais Productions
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