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Problem With Reconnecting Media
Hi guys,
Very annoying problem here.I did a bunch of work at home last night, and brought it back to the office this morning. Everything conencts, except my music track. Problem is, it is a 30-second track that had to be edited heavily to fill my 4-minute timeline, so just re-editing isn’t a good option.
In the timeline, I get the non-rendered beeps. When I try to render I get the error: “file unknown.” When I try to reconnect the media, it will not find it, even though the file is in the folder it should be in. I tried making all the clips in the timeline offline and reconnecting, but when I navigate to the file and click ok, nothing happens in the reconnect dialog and my only choice is to cancel. I tried deleteing the original file and re-importing it, but it will NOT connect it to the timeline and all of my edits.
Why is this one file missing? In the reconnect dialog boxes it doesn’t seem to have a path at all – just a link to my main system drive – but the file was never there.
Is there anything I can do short of re-editing my music? What a pain!
thanks in advance.
scott
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5 Replies
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Keep kludging. Try renaming the music audio file, and perhaps putting it on a different disk, and manually reconnecting to it. Still no? Then try this — if it is an mp3, wav, or aiff, try putting it into Quicktime wrapper. Open it in Quicktime Pro, and export as a Quicktime movie, sound settings linear 48k 16-bit (default extension will now be “.mov”) and try reconnecting to that (saying okay to FCP protests about changed attributes).
If none of that works, try exporting an XML of the sequence in question, import that and then try reconnecting to all said permutations above.
Also, make sure your project file is not on the same disk as the media. Weird FCP bug thingy.
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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Thanks, Bill – I’ll keep trying to figure this out… exporting doesn’t work – I can’t export anything. I get the same “unknown” error. I can’t render, either – same mistake. When I try to reconnect, in the window it says “unspecified path” and that’s why I can’t connect it to anything – even itself. I also tried renaming it, etc, but the reference in the timeline doesn’t have a file path for some reason and there-in lies the problem.
In the meantime what I did was open an older project file, and it was still intact there. So I copied the timeline and pasted it and it worked somehow… still would like to get to the bottom of it in case it comes up again.
Thanks,
Scott -
That’s right, once a clip reference in FCP gets corrupt, there’s no way to repair it. But you can rebuild any part of an edit via an EDL or XML. You would export your audio edit via XML (for instance), bring it back in and reconnect to a similarly rebuilt media clip. If still corrupt, go all the way and do via EDL. I think the internal rebuild is partly what you accomplished by jumping program versions. That’s why I recommend rebuilding the media OUTSIDE of Final Cut (via Quicktime Pro App), as linear in a .mov file or into DV stream first.
Also, make sure the clip name is short and simple with only basic alpha numeric characters, and in a simple path (and all the folders in the path name, and the disk name too, are likewise simple and short alpha-numeric). This will help prevent clip corruption. I find when you lose the name / path of the media in a clip reference (clip corruption), like you have suffered, it correlates with a complex media name and / or path name.
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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I may turn religious, but only for a moment, god bless you Bill.
It’s no wonder people are beginning to jump the FCP ship! With bugs like that. Your tip has saved me 8 – 12 hours work! If you’re in Edinburgh I’ll buy you a pint!
The export / import of project XML works folks. I can confirm it.
Cheers.
Gavin
https://www.gtmp.tv -
Like the energizer bunny, it’s good to know a good tip keeps going and going! I’m glad.
I think the reason everybody is suddenly jumping ship is because in the spring Apple invented iMovie Pro and called it Final Cut X. They stopped support of all earlier versions of Final Cut and pulled them from the shelves. The new version is incompatible both a) with earlier versions of Final Cut (ie., you cannot import old projects) and b) with professional work flows (ie., you can’t do track assignments, for instance, or import/export EDLs, OMFs or XML anymore. Really.) But it IS compatible with iMovie projects. FCPX has kind of a neat new editing interface… but not much good when the new program is missing major organs. Professional editors have nowhere to go but out.
UPDATE: Well, I just wrote this a few minutes ago and then found out that Apple released it’s first update yesterday. They are starting to “put back” some of the things they threw away. The update includes support for XML. That’s progress and a good sign….
BTW, while I’m playing with FCPX, I still use FCP7 for my professional editing work. For now. FCPX, or Premiere, or back to Avid? We’ll see what the future holds!
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