[Ben Insler]

Then you definately need to media manage – trying to find and copy files in the finder would take forever. Follow the same steps that I mentioned earlier, but only select the sequence you want to back up in your browser (rather than selecting all with command+A).

Best,
Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

Bryce,

I assume that compressor must be using a reference movie because I am jumping straight to compressor from FCP (never exporting from FCP). There are no flash frames and all the footage has been generated from images sequences in Maya that have been conformed to DV NTSC .mov footage in After Effects. There are also a few .jpg stills acting as title cards (which are not causing any problems).

Thanks,
Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

First of all, you may have to break the stereo pair of the audio clip (select and press opt+L). Then bring up the mixer (opt+6) and pan the clip(s) there with the sliders on the top below each track name.

best,
Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

Save, Shut Down, Restart. If you’re capturing, you may have to recapture some fome of your logged clips if this happened during capture. Sometimes video communication over the FireWire bus freezes (why…no idea). Even disconnecting and reconnecting your DV device won’t necessarily fix the problem.

Best,

Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

Frank Brings up a good point. There is a drawback to this though. You copy everything, not just everything that’s relevant. For example, if you save a new project file every day (as I do, because if my current one crashes or becomes corrupt I don’t want to lose more than a day’s worth of work), you can have a jumble or worthless render files in your capture scratch from old files. There are ways to clean all these files up using the render manager, but for the time being let’s just say that all those render files are still sitting in your capture scratch somewhere. You may end up copying all of those unnecessary render files. Furthermore, let’s say you were switching between two projects and one day forgot to reset your capture scratch and capture footage from Project A into Project B’s capture scratch archive. The media manager already knows where the footage is and will copy it, whereas if you do this manually you will have to remember all locations where you captured footage and copy each one.

But yes, if you’ve kept your project organized, you can just copy your entire capture scratch folder.

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Yup, media manager will handle that. The media manager is a scary tool because it can be used to alter your media all at once.. but with time it can be used very effectively. For your purposes, click on your project’s tab in the browser window and then press Comman+A (select all) to select everything in your project. Then go to the media manager. Everything nested within your browser folders will deselect, but that’s fine. All root folders will remain selected and that selection will propogate to everything in your browser.

In the media manager, set your media settings to “Copy.” Don’t include render files (you can always re-render, and they usually don’t reconnect properly anyway…). Make sure the “Include master clips outside selection” checkbox is checked if you have the option to do so (it sould be checked and grayed out). MAKE SURE the “Delete unused media from selected clip” option is UNCHECKED – this should gray out the two nested options below this one. Set “Base media file names on ‘existing file names.'”

Under the Project Section, If you check “Duplicate selected clip and palce into a new project,” it will copy all the media to the location you specify, then save a new project file that has all of your footage in the browser llinked to your new location (although your media may be organized in a new way). The new project will also have duplicates of all your sequences. If you only want to back up your media, then you don’t need to duplicate your project, but it might be a nice thing to have in case your main project file crashes – at least you have a backup of the edit.

Obviously in the Media Destination you are telling FCP where to put the media. If we make a folder called ‘Backup’, FCP will create a new folder structure within ‘Backup’ and place all your copied footage into a folder called ‘media’ within ‘Backup’ all of your files will be placed into this one ‘media’ folder, so if you have a capture file structure that you’re working with (i.e. each tape gets captured to is own individual folder to keep your captured reels organized), you may wish to media manage reel by reel rather than doing the whole project at once.

Also, just a quick note. Frequently when you media manage and then reconnect your footage at a later date, speed changes to footage (Especialy variable speed ramps) do not reconnect properly. If you end up removing and then reconnecting your footage, you may have to recreate any speed ramps that you have created.

Good luck,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

I’m not sure what you’re asking, but here’s a stab at an answer. When you nest a sequence (dragging the sequence from the Browser into the timeline of another sequence), FCP makes a single clip of that entire sequence that functions as any ordinary quicktime clip in the timeline. If you hold COMMAND while dropping the sequence you want to nest into the timeline, FCP will recreate the nested sequence, track for track (respectively, depending on where you place the nest), in the timeline – it’s basically like copying and pasting and entire sequence from one timeline to another, just a lot faster and more fun. I hope that helps.

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

To my knowledge you can’t connect a firewire or usb device to two machines at the same time… it would cause tremendous issues with BUS access, and what would happen if both machines were trying to access the a BUS at the same time? Not good. The only way I can see doing it would be to share the drives over a network, like hooked up to a server machine (unless they were network drives, in which case you would only need a router) that could be dedicated to serving the data out to many machines without processing the data at all (you don’t want to share them straight off the machines you’re working on, because they will slow down your machine as they serve the data out to another one)… However you’d need a very fast network, and still could run into speed problems with multiple machines trying to access the same data at the same time.

[Ben Insler]

Apparently outputing using the iPod encoder takes a very long time – that’s just how it is I guess. I suppose you could set up a little render farm, but your mac mini is not going to crunch nearly as fast as your dual 2GHz G5, considering that the best mini out there is a 1.4 GHz G4. If delivery time is of no importance, then you could figure out a way to set it up as long as you’re willing to wait probably more than twice as long as you would have to on the G5. As long as you weren’t working on the same project (or media files) at the same time… I’d say edit off one of your firewire drives with the mini (don’t worry – it might be small, but it can handle it.. without some of the RT benifits) while the G5 continues exporting. Save all your complicated, math-intesive edits on the mini for the end, so that hopefully the G5 is done exportring as you finish roughing out your edit. Then swap the firewire drive back to the G5 and continue editing all the “heavy stuff”. If you’re working with the same media… this won’t work, and you’d also run into trouble even if you farmed out to the mini because the export may be accessing files that you’re also trying to edit with.

Good luck.

Ben

[Ben Insler]

In case you’re new to FCP and not sure what Kevin’s talking about, they’re the little lower case tabs on the left of your timeline tracks (the tracks themselves are labeled with the upper case tabs). Clicking on the lower case tabs will disconnect/connect them. If the audio is disconnected and the video connected, FCP will only insert video when you drag into the timeline video track (but it will place both if you drag all the way down to the audio tracks)… and vice versa. If they’re all disconnected, FCP will insert video if you drag to a video track, and audio if you drag to an audio track. If you leave only one video track connected, FCP will only insert one audio track (if there are two) with the video.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Ben