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Sharing FCPX projects
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Hello Andreas,
Your suggestion to clone seems the best solution in my case. Thanks for clarifying the solution.
Bruce Wittman
Executive ProducerEagle Video Productions, Inc.
2201 Woodnell Drive
Raleigh, NC 27603-5240Website: http://www.eaglevideo.com
Email: bruce@eaglevideo.compho: 919-779-7891
cel: 919-818-5556 -
[Craig Alan] “On FCP X, are you saying to store the project files and media on external drive or drives and only the application itself on the system drive?”
That is precisely what I do.
My internal drive, whether on my MacPro or my Laptop has ONLY the FCP-X program file resident.
Everything else is stored on external Firewire 800 drives. Those drives can be used for a single large project/client – or can be used for lots of smaller projects. Whichever way you go – X simply “reads” the entire event/project structure instantly (including render files and resources like titles,etc.) when the drive is mounted – so there’s no penalty for keeping assets off-line in this way.
The key is to then back up your projects using the Move or Duplicate command onto a safety drive so that if you have a single drive failure, you don’t lose everything, but Time Machine mirroring makes that pretty simple – just leave your project drive connected overnight, or invoke a manual TM backup when you leave for lunch.
Flexibility AND safety, imo.
This is for the small project based practitioner, not someone working on massively shared storage or networks, obviously. But it’s a workflow that’s never let me down in the best part of a year working this way.
YMMV.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Thanks. Seems to happen this way by default. I’ll just make sure to back up the project file.
MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170, Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.
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We have a procedure for sharing projects at remote sites without a SAN or anything else. It relies on both sites having the same media, or at least the base media. It’s worked perfectly and the project is small enough to be emailed back and forth.
This is for FCPX 10.1
https://tvlvideo.com/sharing-fcp-10-1-projects/ -
FCP X – previous versions of the program simply allowed me to “relink” media when copied to a 2nd external drive – doesn’t work anymore – sad. I don’t see an easy solution for simply wanting to have an exact clone of the current project in the event that the working drive fails. Pathetic.
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[Damon Zwicker] “FCP X – previous versions of the program simply allowed me to “relink” media when copied to a 2nd external drive – doesn’t work anymore – sad.”
It *should* work if the two external drives are named the same and the folder paths are the same.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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If a library that your checking has missing links in a project or event can’t you just navigate to where its stored on the clone drive?
I’d be concerned about this but I have not read this anywhere else since the new upgrade.
Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.
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Hi Bruce,
I had a similar type of use case a few weeks ago and I documented what I did here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/49061#49305
This may be of use or may be irrelevant, but I wanted to share a project between my desktop and laptop and only have low res proxies on the laptop. This workflow, allowed me to ensure that changes went between both systems, but you need to be mindful of adding new media to ensure it’s available to both systems. One other word of caution and that is to make sure that if you use any custom plugins etc, that they are installed and available on both machines.
Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”
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This may seem foolhardy, but I’ve been experimenting using Dropbox to share projects with myself between home and work and I’ve learned a couple of things:
1) Dropbox usually wants you to locate the Dropbox folder on your boot drive. This is unnecessary and you can change the location to your media drive, which in my case is a Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID. The advantages are that project files are run from a fast RAID, the files get regular Time Machine backup and my boot drive doesn’t clog up.
2) I keep all of media external to the FCPX library.
3) I keep the FCPX library on Dropbox when not in use, but, and this is key: before I open FCPX, I copy just the library out of Dropbox to another location on my media drive or boot drive. The reason for this is that Dropbox wants to synchronize your FCPX library with the cloud as changes are made. In doing so, Dropbox takes control of the library and if you’re running it in FCPX, you will error and crash. However, if the library file is OUTSIDE of Dropbox, you are still connected to the media but Dropbox does not mess with your session.
4) Once I’m done editing, I copy the file back to Dropbox to allow the other editor (in this case me at home) to open the project on their end. Again, the library must be copied out of Dropbox during edit.
5) Because the file is or is not in Dropbox, it’s easy to see if the other person is working on the library.
A couple of caveats:
1) Most Dropbox Plus users have a 1TB limit, so this may be a dealbreaker for some.
2) The media must be fully synchronized before you can edit with it on the remote end. The local user works as normal.
Some advantages:
1) Dropbox has a robust incremental version control system which allows you to revert to a version for at least 30 days (Pro goes for 120 days)
2) No duplicating of media, no proxies.
3) No reconnecting media because FCPX figures out where the media is (generally) and keeps in touch with it.
I’m sure there will be plenty of people to tell me why I’m crazy to try this, but I have completed several projects going back and forth between work and home and did not skip a beat. Please let me know if any of you have tried this or something similar in the cloud.
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One other thing I forgot to mention: this workflow depends on each editor working sequentially not simultaneously on the project. It would be possible for you to have two FCPX libraries and each reference the same shared media in Dropbox. Then at some point, you could merge your libraries and consolidate things a bit better.
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