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Saving Projects and the Autosave Vault
A while back, I had a read a post advising NOT to use Final Cut’s Autosave feature. For the life of me, I cannot recall why. It was buggy/unreliable?
I have a large on-going project that I have been daily “saving as” a new project file name (ie “myproject_date”). This has proven to be a MESS as far as file storage and organization since Final Cut creates folders for each new project name for Capture, Render, Etc.
I have searched through old posts and other forums and am still unsure. What is the best practice for saving large on-going projects? Is Autosave reliable? It certainly seems cleaner.
Is there a way to manually ‘save as’ an autosave document type?How should I now clean house? I’m assuming delete all render files and re-render as needed.
Thank you in advance for your help!
Annie -
2 Replies
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Annie,
I can’t image why Autosave Vault would be a problem. The tricks are these. When you do a “Save As”, use that as a back-up copy, but don’t continue on that the next day. Continue on the original main project. Second thing is that when you have to retrieve a version in the Vault after a crash, it will be date/time stamped. Open it and then immediately save it over the original project using the same name (“replace file” – yes). This should keep your media folders straight.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Hi Anna,
I think the advise you describe is from someone who had difficulties with Autosave. These difficulties are not from FCP directly. My AutoSave works like a charm and saved me couple of times! So NEVER turn off AutoSave. Make it Autosave every ten minutes (or when your doing very fast compositing, with multiple keyframes etc, every 5 mintes).
So to summarise Olivers and my post a few advises:
1. Always Turn ON Autosave Vault.
2. Put the AutoSave files on a different disk (not a different partition)than the original project file. You will always have a pretty recent projectfile if one of the disks is crashing…)
3. Make a manual backup every (Half-)day with the ‘save as’ command. (After that don’t forget to close the project and re-open the original file.)
4. If you need an autosaved file just open it from the finder, rather then restoring it from within FCP. After opening it, directly give it the original filename. (To be honoust: I had problems with Restore myself in the past, so I got used to just open the autosaved files and rename them. It could be that it works now, but I just found another way of doing it).Now to clean up your mess:
You can consider to put all render files in on render folder. All the captured material in one Capture Scratch folder, etc.
Files will be then get offline, but FCP will probably be able to automatically reconnect.
‘Probably’… So if it’s not really necessary, leave it as it is: It’s possilble that there are double clip names, etc, so that it will be hard, if not impossible, for FCP to reconnect.
‘If it aint broken, don’t fix it’.But in the future use the given workflow.
All the best
Rienk
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