Understanding fcpbundle

[Mark Suszko]

What I might do is… use just the mac pro’s internal drives, but USE PROXY FILES for everything. When you get back to base, or are happy with the edit, synchronize and update the project files with the home setup, and render out master files. I don’t know for sure if the bundle includes the Library or not, partly because I’m not an expert, partly because, you can choose where the real library lives, internally or externally. I keep all my libraries on the external RAID with the source material.

[William Schelhas]

Thanks for your reply. I am actually just using a macBOOK Pro. I have this one which is 2018 High Sierra and another which is 2013 Mavericks which I have as a legacy machine to use QT 7 Pro, FCP 7 an Adobe CS5.1 suite… and some other stuff. Not like I have something more powerful to make the modifications from Proxy etc. Not now anyway. I lost my regular job a little over a year ago through downsizing and they closed my department. I have gone off on my own and am contracting and just building up my resources for myself. Most of my stuff is pretty small scale and my real issue comes down to freeing up space on this machine to start new stuff. With 1 tb internal I have been able to get about 4 projects on here before I now have to off load my old stuff to make room for new projects. I got down to about 20g left. The last couple months was particularly busy and now I have a little backup. I just don’t want to dump the old projects, in case I have to revisit them or use something as a template for a new project. I am trying to figure out how best to archive the old finished stuff and if there are other files that I need to search for or if everything is in the fcpbundle. I know there must be better ways to do this but I am so shell shocked and afraid of hooking up Hard Drives and crashing them as right out of the box, this machine or the hub trashed 2 Hard drives. One full of material that I have yet to recover. Something about corrupted B tree. I just bought an APPLE USB-C to SD adapter but they did not have any USB-C to USB at the time. So, I am taking one project at a time and copying it to a 128 g SD and then putting it into my other computer which has a SD Slot to archive onto a Portable hard Drive. That is until I get to my last project which is about 400g and I will have to sweat it with a Hard Drive through the IOGEAR hub. As I mentioned, I am trying to confirm if the fcpbundle contains everything. I opened one on a copy that I transferred to my old Macbook External Drive and it does seem to contain an Event File, Analysis, Shared Items, Original Media, Render Files, Motion Templates, FlexoLibrary, Current Verasion and Settings along with a couple other files. Again, thanks for your information. One of my next efforts is to definitely work out a Raid setup to backup my stuff. Perhaps the thing to do would be to come up with a USB-C connection to whatever input to a RAID instead of backing up to these portable drives.

[Mark Suszko]

Glad to hear you’re working. Doesn’t help your immediate issue, but consider building in the cost of an archival drive for billing each job you do. We’re talking $50-$90 bucks here for a couple terabytes.

[Joby Anthony jr]

William, these two links to Larry Jordan’s resources might be helpful to you in getting a better understanding of what’s happening under the hood of the .fcpbundle. And Mark’s suggestion about working with proxies while traveling is a solid scenario for a laptop, but run some workflow tests first so you have a good idea of what’s happening under-the-hood and how to relink back to the higher res media when you get home. Can be a little complicated till you get the steps down.

https://larryjordan.com/articles/where-does-final-cut-pro-x-store-media/

https://larryjordan.com/articles/fcp-x-v-10-1-media-management-collection/

— Joby.

[Joe Marler]

[William Schelhas] ” I have had Hard drives REPEATEDLY disconnect incorrectly and have trashed 2 brand new drives….Hard Drive through the IOGEAR hub….

Many USB-A hubs don’t support enough current for certain bus-powered portable drives. This will cause those drives to unpredictably drop off line, possibly damaging data if transfers are in progress. The review sits for the IOGEAR hub have many complaints about this.

Probably the most reliable option is getting individual Apple USB-C to USB-A adapters. There may be other hubs which work better, but most reviews are superficial. Almost no reviewer uses instrumentation to monitor or graph power/current consumption during various operations. Most hubs use a chip set which only supports 900 milliamps peak, and several portable drives draw more than this for certain operations. It can be very unpredictable — on drive might work and another not. It might work with one drive plugged in but not two, or might work until they are both seeking.

This doesn’t happen when they are plugged into an iMac or a 2015 or earlier MacBook Pro because the USB chip set Apple uses can supply more current. On 2016 or later MacBook Pros, the USB-C ports can supply plenty of current — provided no sub-standard hub gets in the way. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link.

[William Schelhas] ” …I now have 4 projects on my Macbook and the 1tb drive is almost full. I have to purge something. Is it safe to move the fcbundle files to another drive to archive? Do they contain all the material I need to reopen the project if I need it?”

Normally you can move a library and (if external media) it will reconnect. If the library uses managed internal media it is self contained. There can be libraries which contain both types of media. Media management in FCPX can become quite complex. I strongly recommend you get the Ripple Training tutorial on FCPX 10.4 media management. It covers all these areas, including proxy-only workflow:

https://www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cut-pro/media-management-in-final-cut-pro-10-4/

There are some useful 3rd-party tools such as Final Cut Library Manager: https://www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

And Reference X: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/2038-copy-media-out-of-final-cut-pro-x-with-reference-x

[William Schelhas]

Thanks for the replies. They have been a help. I went to Best Buy the other day and got an Apple Adapter for SD Cards but they were out of the USB-C to USB-A(?). I have to make a trip out to an Apple Store to get one of those. They are a little further away. I was concerned that It was the power thing, or my concern that the weight of the dock and a hard drive were putting stress on the connection that has been making the drives disconnect.

As for the fcpbundle file, I have started to use my habits from FCP7 when editing with FCPX. That is, I create a folder for every project. In this case, on my desktop rather than a hard drive. I put all my assets into those folders then import them into my project. From Reading Larry Jordan’s tutorial, it seems that I might have some unnecessary redundancy with that. When I Import Media into a Library or Project in FCPX, it might be getting converted and saved in the fcpbundle but I also have it in the projects folder. That would explain why one of my projects is 400gig for 2 1:30 speeches. There was a Powerpoint, a conversion to JPG and an mp4 video clip. What I have encountered thus far is that the project is being saved into my Movies file and not in that folder that I created. So, before moving the project off of the new Macbook Pro, I have been moving the fcpbundle file into that folder. On the last project I did, I realized that I could actually tell FCPX to save the bundle to the project’s folder on the desktop. I might just keep doing that to save myself from having to move files around. Also, my entire project, theoretically, should be contained in the one folder which I can more easily share with others or between computers.

My theory here is that by keeping all my materials and the fcpbundle in the folder on the desktop, I can just turn on my Macbook and edit and not have to connect all the peripherals every time. Less clutter and easier to do in confined places. But, the downside is the HD space. I now wish I had ordered my Macbook and gotten the 2tb drive rather than buying it on the spot at The Apple Store where I was limited to only 1 tb. An order with 2 tb would have taken 10 days to receive. As I mentioned, I seem to be limited to about 4 projects at a time in the space I have available. Fortunately, that seems to be the most I would have to deal with but this last couple months has been exceptionally busy and I now have a 5th project that I can’t start until I can purge 2 or 3 of the ones that I have just finished.

Now I am going to go through the FCPX Preferences to see how I have it handling imports. I think I have keep in place selected but from opening up the fcpbundle file on my old MacBook, it looks like the files like jpgs and logos. music and Digital Juice stuff is all in the bundle file. ???