URGENT – Cinema Tools Database Error

[Martin Roe]

Solved!

And as initially feared and then hoped and then thought unlikely, the problem was totally noob

It was nothing to do with Cinema Tools.

It was a media storage issue.

At the post house I just left, a system was introduced where folders of importance were renamed with a leading ! . So, for example OUTPUTS became ! OUTPUTS.

It seemed to make sense as if you’re reading this, you know full well how many lists get made in this game. And it was a quick way to single out important ones.

But don’t be too quick to judge, the ignorance did not run so deep as to rename the CT files or indeed Media files of any kind. Only folders.

Now, what was changed in this case, was a folder two levels above the CT files. And what makes it interesting is that this has become a problem for the first time only now.

This folder contains all the project media for over a terabytes worth of constantly revolving information that is run across four machines and which has been used happily by all of 3D/2D & NLE Apps under the sun, including ALL the other FCPS apps for months.

Actually I can’t say all the other apps – I don’t use live type – does anyone?

But what matters, boys and girls, is that today we learned that Cinema Tools is special and doesn’t like to play with the other apps. It wants to ruin your day and keep you up all night over a little exclamation point.

Bah!

I miss Avid sometimes. Is there any chance that FCP might do a media storage set-up like AVID, where it makes copies of what you import and stores them and their metadata in one safe, proprietary place? With the cost of hard drive space these days and the amount of my day that’s been wasted, I think we’ve got a water-tight case for change on our hands.

[Mark Raudonis]

[Martin Roe] ” miss Avid sometimes. Is there any chance that FCP might do a media storage set-up like AVID, where it makes copies of what you import and stores them and their metadata in one safe, proprietary place?”

Martin,

I’m trying not to be “too quick to judge”…. but what are you talking about here?

Do you mean media? Sequence info? What?

Mark

[Steven Gonzales]

These characters have special meaning in Unix, and can cause problems in OSX, which runs over Unix:

\$ ; \ / & ! * | ` ‘ ” < > ? ( ) [ ]

They should be avoided in file or folder names.

Avid has its proprietary media database as the heart of its file organization. Final Cut is running using Quicktime programming interfaces.

The advantage is that Final Cut can import and export quicktime files to other apps easily, and as features are added to Quicktime, they easily integrate to Final Cut. The downside is that Final Cut does not have a separate database of files used only by itself.

Cinema Tools is a computer program, and it doesn’t have any malicious intent, though it may seem that way when there is a problem with file naming.

[Misha Aranyshev]

[Martin Roe] “s there any chance that FCP might do a media storage set-up like AVID, where it makes copies of what you import and stores them and their metadata in one safe, proprietary place?”

I hope it never does anything like this. What I hope is the feud between QuickTime greybeards and NeXTie’s at Apple is over one day and QT and Mac OS X start working together as they should.

[Martin Roe]

Thank you Steven for being able to see what I meant, better than i could.

[Martin Roe]

Thank you Steven for being able to see what I meant, better than i could.

A combination of exhaustion, stress and overwhelming relief meant that I felt entitled to rather more opinion last night than I can actually back up this morning…

Which is the only way that I can explain why I seem to have suggested that Avid’s storage system would have in anyway saved me from… what I’d be grateful if we could call… the human error that caused me to still be at work right now.

And I think that transparent smokescreens like that deserve rapid judgement for all my protestations to the contrary 🙂

What’s interesting, is that whilst I knew that the way that FCP handles media has always confused me, I didn’t know what it was that bugged me about it.

Put another way – i knew I had a question, but it wasn’t until I saw your answer that I knew what it was…

What does FCP gain from not having its own database and not taking a more proactive hand in managing its media?

That I only figured out the question because you gave me the answer means I don’t get a cookie. But perhaps it will get me another answer.

You say that the trade off is speed. Which seems reasonable – you don’t have to render every import… simply makes it faster… no question.

But apart from that stage is FCP really quicker? Is there any data on this?

I can’t help feeling that the Avid model where files, once imported are, copied, relocated and unified (by which I mean MXF – which I will admit to not fully understanding ) gives you a security that FCP lacks. And that it’s not really any faster.

Or if it is… the future should be about making stability faster, getting our cake out and eating it.

I bet there’s a thread on this, huh? I’m intrigued. And man enough to admit my mistakes.

As I sit here watching the pull list print, it’s pretty obvious that with my old filenaming system, I’d have crashed an avid eventually too.

So I’m going to accept it. There’s no one else to blame, Cinema Tools wasn’t trying to ruin my evening…

Wikipedia was.

When it was suggested that we use the ! naming system at my last place of work, we all thought it sounded like a bad idea.

But the suggester had two very strong arguments on his side… the fact that it worked fine with every app we tried, and that fact that the wiki entry for filename lists OSX’s file name limitations as being only two – null : and backslash /

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename

We believed. We thought we were the future. We quickly read the article without fully understanding it because it was useful. And so i ended up missing Lost…

! You all know who to blame.

[Misha Aranyshev]

[Martin Roe] “What does FCP gain from not having its own database and not taking a more proactive hand in managing its media? “

Shorter developing time. QuickTime is good tech. Mac OS X data nad metadata handling is good tech. FCP developers don’t have to spend time building the whole thing, they can build on top of existing tech. The problem is QT is Old Apple, Mac OS X is New Apple. They still don’t play along very well years after NeXT acquisition. Just like Avid and Digidisign.

When Avid started back in the eighties there was no QT or affordable UNIX with usable GUI so they had to come up with OMF.

[Martin Roe]

Would I be right in saying that you see FCP’s lack of central management as a progression, then? That it’s actually going to be more effective, once the team starts playing together?

May I ask in what ways QT and OSX are at odds? Not politically, I mean, but technically. What is it that the politics are holding us back from?

[Misha Aranyshev]

Audio I/O in classic Mac OS was handled by Sound Manager. Mac OS X introduced much better multichannel audio architecture – Core Audio. It took FCP quite a while after Core Audio introduction to take advantage of this architecture because it had to wait until QT team make QT talk to CA. But when it finally did it was cool. There is Core Image image manipulation architecture in Mac OS X. It handles high bit depth and different color spaces much better than legacy code in QT. Again it will take time until QT and FCP fully use CI. There is Core Data architecture in Mac OS X and there is plenty room for metadata in QT file structure but only Apple programmers know when this two technologies become mutually transparent.

In theory QT movie can store not only the reel number and timecode but also what FCP project it was created in and by what copy of FCP on what Mac and many more. Then Core Data can be used for managing this media. And it would be available not only to FCP but for any Apple or third-party application. That’s why I don’t want to see FCP getting its own closed media architecture. Duplicate effort and bad interoperability.

The only bad part of this is while greybeards and NeXTies were figuring out who’s the boss MXF become a standard and deservingly so.

[Martin Roe]

Thank you.

That’s completely fascinating. I look forward to seeing how things develop.

Cheers!