Relink Generated Files

[Francois Jean]

I suggest you look at the 10.4.9 update although it has a few minor bugs it has extraordinary work flow for relinking proxies even to third party generated ones! It works great.

FRANCOIS

[Terry Barnum]

As Francois says, 10.4.9 has some really great media management improvements, but before you upgrade, do some research. If you do upgrade to 10.4.9 make sure you first archive your 10.4.8 and have backups of the libraries you’re working on. Several people are encountering issues with 3rd party plugins that are causing problems with FCPX 10.4.9. If you use Sony FX9 media, don’t upgrade until Sony releases a new plugin.

-Terry

[Thanos Papadopoulos]

Yes I did the update and has the option that I was looking for! Although I didn’t see this option for the optimised clips. Is there something similar? Why only proxy relink?

Fix it in Pre.

[Joe Marler]

[Thanos Papadopoulos] “Yes I did the update and has the option that I was looking for! Although I didn’t see this option for the optimised clips. Is there something similar? Why only proxy relink?”

Good question. Proxies were the biggest problem for these reasons:

Proxies were commonly used as a smaller-size “proxy only” library to facilitate remote work. Hence they were often put on different drives with different volume names which broke the links, since volume name of the drive where they were generated was burned into the library and could not be changed.

By contrast optimized media was about 6x the size of H264 originals and not commonly distributed or moved.

Starting with 10.4.9 there these improvements were made:

(1) Proxies can be relinked
(2) If creating proxies, they apparently are tracked by inode lookup within a volume. IOW the proxies can be relocated anywhere on the volume without relinking.
(3) If optimized media (only) is created, those cannot be relinked but they are apparently tracked by inode like the proxy case. Moving or even renaming the file does not break the link.

If proxies + optimized media is created, evidently the proxies get the inode lookup. This may be a limitation in the SQL table schema within the library where they aren’t storing inode separately for proxies and optimized media.

As with earlier versions, the media files themselves use inode lookup and can be relocated or renamed within the volume and FCPX will find them without a relink. The symlinks pointing to those moved or renamed media files will automatically be rebuilt. This of course assumes the disk volumes are HFS+ or APFS.

While there is no formal relink for optimized media, it can be manually relinked if the filenames and file extensions are the same. This might require bulk renaming the extension from .mov to .mp4.