Why is Media Manager so bad?

[David Roth weiss]

Dave,

More than likely you’re referring to the “consolidate” feature, which is admittedly a bit risky, but just for the record, not every action in Media Manager is as horrific as you make it out to be. The “Move” feature, in which FCP rounds up every single element in a project and places it on a hard drive in the directory of your choice, actually works quite well. And, there are other feature that also work well.

DRW

[Nick Ryan]

I’m not really that interested in all the off-lining/on-lining features of MM, I’m more interested in trimming off the fat of a project before I archive it. Is there an easy way to do this outside of MM?

Nick

[Ron James]

Don’t believe the hype. I’ve been using MM to do various things (like taking sequences away on a FW drive to work on another tower, for instance) and have NEVER had a problem.

The number one problem: user error.

Make sure you follow along in the online manual, step by step. If you’re consolidating (which I’ve never had a problem, either) I’d make a copy if possible, if your disk space allows. That way you’re making a copy of all the consolidated media, dropping the excess, and you have opportunity to check and make sure everything is as it should be before dropping your original source stuff. Worst case scenario, you’ve got your source tapes anyway, right?

Don’t forget to the make your clips independent command.

I think most people who complain about MM are simply repeating what they’ve heard, or they’ve not followed proper procedure. Some tasks are a little more complicated than they need to be. The key is to understand what you’re doing BEFORE you do it.

HTH.

[Arnie Schlissel]

[reel2reel] “The number one problem: user error.”

Amen! Most people using FCP don’t realize that ‘media management’ starts with how you log & capture your footage. If you looked in the Capture Scratch folders of the people who have the biggest problems with MM, I think you’d find a lot of folders named “Untitled Project”, containing a lot of files named “Untitled”, all of which are on reel # 001.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Tunaking]

Actually, to blame “User Error” does the community a disservice. The Media Manager has gotten some well deserved flack from people who want to use it for online edits (Create Offline). This function has some serious repeatable bugs that happen even with well logged material.

Problems with Create Offline are:
1) MM does not delete unused material if your media is offline when you do the MM function. Translation: A client brings you a project file to online in HD on CD. You open the project, naturally everything is offline. Try to Create offline with this project and delete the unused media. And you will see what I mean. When you try to redigitize the material at 10-bit uncompressed HD it says you need to capture 60 hours of footage. So, how do you work around this? You can export an XML and import that into FCP 4.5 and media manage it in there (which can handle projects with offline media) or you can start exporting EDLs. No kidding.

2) If you have the media attached, MM only deletes media properly if you deselect “Include Master clips” (which I think is actually correct, BTW, although that is different than what it did in FCP 4.5). However, any clips that have their speeds reversed are reduced to a single frame in length. Try it, you’ll see. If Include Master Clips is selected, MM will hardly delete anything (especially if you are editing multicam). When you are working in HD, this often makes the difference between doable and impossible because digitizing 30 hours of uncompressed HD is not an option.

3) Layer masks (filters) do not translate well from offline edits like DV 16X9 to HD. As a result, result you have to do a lot of tweaking in HD with the garbage mattes and what-have-you.

4) Motion effects, like rolling titles, don’t translate well from SD to HD offline to online scenarios.

On the good side:

I have had a lot of success with Recompress and I use it alot.

I have also had success with the Copy function also.

So there are somethings that work quite well in MM. It really depends on what kind of work you do.