Reconnecting recovered (rescued) files

[Michael Sacci]

IF the file’s names have changed there is no connection between them and FCP.

My thinking, go back to the P2 files and recapture them. That way this will be right for sure.

[David Roth weiss]

You made two very significant errors and you’re now hoping there’s a magic bullet that will save you? Sorry, but neither editng nor life works like that.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Arnie Schlissel]

If it were me, I’d have started with recapturing the files. this is why it’s important to keep the original card dumps from tapeless media.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Don Walker]

Justin,
Truthfully a batch capture from P2 files should be fairly painless and semi-automatic.
Don Walker

John 3:16

[Justin Lewis]

Thanks everyone for your replies.

As has been pointed out, looks like the safest way is to recapture from the P2 files. Still so much work to rename them all correctly as they go in!

Fortunately the project is a documentary/travelogue format and so the bins were created around a linear time structure (day1 morning, day1 afternoon etc etc). At least I can easily match these up sequentially with the P2 folders and see which (most!!) of the offline files need recapturing – would have been much harder to find things if hadn’t been organized in bins this way.

Still – a lot of grunt work for yours truly over next couple of days.

Incidentally, I’m still wondering how this first happened. Somehow during the L&T process, FCP had created 2 different capture scratch folders on the HD, with about half the project files going into each. I had been making backups of the capture scratch, and original P2 files to go on separate drives. Not realizing there were 2 different scratch folders – i only backed up the first one I saw. Later, when I saw the other one I made the fateful mistake of assuming another copy had been made and left on the drive, so trashed it to clean up and save space. The folder size was so similar I didn’t consider it could be different!

Anyway my bad obviously, but my question is – why/how did FCP create another capture scratch folder during the L&T process?

[Michael Sacci]

I have never seen FCP do something like this by itself. I have done things without thinking, like the capture drive is not mounted and I quickly set it to another drive than it captures to that one instead. It will always make a folder in the capture scratch with the name of the project, but will not automatically switch to where the files go.

[Justin Lewis]

Thanks Michael for the above, and again to all of you for feedback. Perhaps some of you cahn help me with the final hurdle?

OK – the situation isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I’m a bit confused with the exact process for reconnecting in this instance.

I have all the original P2 files on another drive – great. When I launch log and transfer and select any of the files I need – the metadata i created with them (scene names and notes etc – ie the same file names as what’s missing) is all there – great.

Now, if I start transferring, the files appear in the browser as they usually do when you’re starting from the beginning. But – they are obviously “duplicates” (in name only of course) to the files that are sitting in their bins but market in red as missing.

I can see I’m so close – but can’t get my head around which way to do this? What is the process to re-transfer all the missing files back in, then re-connect them so they are recognized again. Do I bring them all in, then “trash” the red “missing file names, and fcp will recognize the new connected ones – or do something different? I stress again – the files coming in again are identically named.