Transferring Projects to a new drive…what’s up with (fcp1)

[Jeremy Garchow]

Event A and Project 3 were in place before you copied another copy of them over there?

[Greg Fulcher]

Hi John,

I’m curious if you’ve found resolution to your question. I’m trying to see if FCP.X is a viable solution to an on-going, ever-growing project that requires monthly delivery of completed videos for 15 different automakers. Assets are of mixed size/type and cover each model in detail from 2005 to present-day and moving forward. Currently, for 2011-12 alone, there are over 8000 video clips.

I imported them into a new event, choosing to use references instead of copying the media to said event. They have been key-worded/tagged and organized by keyword lists in folders in the main event.

Editing with the reference files has worked fine for this initial delivery cycle, and I wanted to see if I could DUPLICATE the project to another drive so as to hand it off to one of my sub-contracted editors off-site.

Last night, I did just that, all 8000+ clips and 1.6TB of it.

1) it takes FCP.X a long time to open the project (5 minutes), and then it sits and spins for a bit before you can do anything.
[The drive the files reside on is an 8-drive Raid5 array with 8-channel eSATA. Throughput is 800MB/sec read, 720MB/sec write. Computer is a MacPro
3,1 with 16 GB of ECC Ram]

2) there are many ‘offline’ assets in the duplicated event, and each one seems to be a duplicate of itself. More specifically, there is an “Asset 123”, which is online, but without any metadata associated with it (no keywords or custom roles assigned) and an “Asset 123” which is offline, but has keywords/roles as-assigned. Some are JPEG images, most are video already transcoded to PR411 (LT).

Exploring the “original media” folder in this new, duplicated event reveals that each of the offline files in the event library also happen to have been appended with (fcp1).mov that you’ve asked about. Others are left un-touched. Of the 8000 or so total assets, 2400 of them are in this state.
The newly-created (fcp1).mov files are complete and playable, outside FCP.X.

I should add the clips in the event library within FCP.X have NOT been modified with the (fcp1), so I suspect there’s a mis-match between the event library and the clips copied (and renamed by FCP.X) to the duplicated event.

3) Try to delete one of the offline clips from the event library, and it takes FCP.X at least 5 minutes to do so and refresh, while deleting an online clip is a quick affair.

As an experiment, I isolated all of the (fcp1) files in the original media folder, and ran an automator script to remove the (fcp1), bringing the files back to their original names. Once done, I relaunched FCP.X and opened up the duplicated event. No change with the offline media, except now there is a second associated asset — a compound clip — bearing the same name that is also offline. (see image attached). There is also an “online” clip with the same name but with no contents (no duration, nothing), also seen in the attached image.

So very strange. I’ll continue to work with my referenced-asset event & projects, and might see if breaking the events apart by automaker, instead of having all of them in one event in folders, will help. I suspect this has to do with the number of clips I’m working with.

Thanks,
-greg

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[John Flores]

Question about you transfer of 1.6tb of clips and such – did you do within FCPX or in Finder?

I just upgraded my Promise R4 Thunderbolt RAID from 1TB drives to 2TB drives. As part of that, I backed up the old data 2 ways:

1 – Making copies within FCPX
2 – Making copies within Finder

Method 1 resulted in the (fcp1) issue – because I had Events used in more than one Project. Since the transfer, I’ve used the copies that I created via the Finder and placed them in the rebuilt RAID with the same volume name, and the seem to work fine. Mind you, I haven’t dug into all of the Events and Projects to see if the links and references are still intact, but at least I’m not dealing with (fcp1) issues.

I also read somewhere that if want to take a drive “offline” so that FCPX doesn’t see the Projects or Events on that drive (i.e., a backup drive), simply rename the “Final Cut Events” and “Final Cut Projects”. This leads me to believe that FCPX final management is relatively dumb, i.e., all metadata (keywords, favorites, etc…) are stored in the CurrentVersion.fcpevent stored in each Event folder, not in some other database hidden/stored somewhere else on the system.

I also just tried reverting to a prior version of a project by pulling the older “CurrentVersion.fcpproject” from Time Machine. That seems to work fine as well.

So my current theory is that you’ll be ok as long as you keep volume names, folder names and paths consistent, you can move stuff around in the Finder and be ok. What you can’t do without risk in the Finder is things like renaming folders, changing the paths between folders and events, etc…

Let me know how things work out Greg. Sounds like an interesting project.

johnmflores.com
whatblogisthis.blogspot.com/