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Referencing Media?
Hi All,
I’m running into an issue that I’m hoping you can help me with.
I imported all of my clips off of a hard drive, placed them into different events and edited 6 different projects.Suddenly I have those pesky red missing clips on my timeline and in the browser. I’ve tried relinking them, but nothing shows up in the window to search form.
I’ve manually found the clips in question, and reimported them. These clips have the little camera icon on them in the browser, which is strange because never imported them from a camera!
After reimporting them, they immediately show up in my project timeline, however when I try to export the project, I get the following message:
“This item cannot be shared while it is still referencing media on the camera.”I’m very confused and frustrated!! What is this and why is it happening? More importantly how can I fix this? BTW when I’ve gone to file/import the “reimport from camera/archive is not highlighted.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much!
Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com -
7 Replies
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Are your source clips Panasonic AVCHD clips?
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No. They are h.264 files
Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com -
Did you copy the card structure to the root of your hard drive?
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No. This was shot by a crew in another state, and they shipped me the drive with the video files. We do this all of the time.
Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com -
Right. But if the card structure was duplicated at the root level of the drive, Final cut will see the drive as a camera. Sounded like that’s what was going on. Needs to finish importing perhaps. Anything going on in the background tasks?
______________________________________________________
https://BretFX.com FCPX Plugins & Templates
New Transition Pack! SLIDE WIPES Customizable Wipes that Move
https://bretfx.com/product/slide-wipes -
Was the media imported with “leave files in place” or was it copied to the library? If “in place”, was it imported directly from the hard drive they sent you? If so was that formatted HFS+, exFAT or NTFS?
If it was copied to the library, you shouldn’t have missing media, assuming the library itself is on an HFS+ or APFS partition.
If it was imported “in place” from exFAT or NTFS, then FCPX cannot store the inode of the media files since those filesystems don’t support that. It will still usually work but won’t be as resilient as HFS+.
When FCPX references “in place” media there are two levels of indirection. The first step is retrieving the pathname to the symlink from the SQL tables within CurrentVersion.fcpevent. The next step is resolving the symlink to the actual file. If this fails it will try to resolve the inode which is also stored for each media file within the SQL table. If that works it will rebuild the symlink to point to the right place. The auto-rebuild doesn’t work for external proxies only regular media files.
Re “Suddenly I have those pesky red missing clips on my timeline and in the browser”, at that moment did you try to access those media files from Finder? Is is possible the drive was momentarily off line?
There are cases where a “stale cache” problem can cause transient red clips. Sometimes this happens from a drive going off line or multiple external drives mounting in a different order after restart. You can sometimes fix this by deleting the FCPX cache and restarting FCPX.
For existing files, Finder CMD+I on the symlink will show the expected location. Unfortunately if an “in place” file is missing, Finder CMD+I confusingly shows the symlink’s own location, not where it’s pointing to. You can inspect the symlink pointer using the terminal ls -l command, but you must navigate in terminal to the Orig. Media folder within the library to do that.
As Brett said, another possibility is the files were imported from a card folder tree and it somehow didn’t finish the import. I’ve seen that reported a few times but have never experienced it.
If you haven’t run Disk Utility First Aid, that might be a good idea. Maybe it’s a permissions or file system issue.
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Joe here are my answers.
Was the media imported with “leave files in place” – YES. It was imported from their hard drive to my hard drive will all of the other 200 clips that play fine.
“Did you try to access those media files from Finder? Is is possible the drive was momentarily off line?” – The drive was not off line as all of my other video clips were playing fine from the same drive. I could not access the files through FCPX but I could in finder from the hard drive.
“You can sometimes fix this by deleting the FCPX cache and restarting FCPX” – I did both it didn’t help.
To your other comments and Brett’s comments, these files played fine at first and then suddenly they went off line. I did find a weird solution through Ripple Training. Here’s the link . I can’t figure out why this worked, but it did.
Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com
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