[Ken Jones]

I had a four hour sequence I needed to re-capture. Media Manager informed me that it was going to capture ELEVEN hours of footage. I called FCP support and they said they would need to charge me $199 to “give you an answer you are probably not going to like”. I asked why they were going to charge me if the fault was with FCP? So I hung up the phone and went out and spent $600 to purchase larger drives for my RAID instead of giving them $199 to tell me that I am basically screwed.

[Ken Jones]

Walter Biscardi recently started a thread about this too: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1025369

[Ken Jones]

I was complaining about this just a few days ago: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1024056#1024094

I am truly amazed at how horrible the Media Manager is. I mean come on… this is simple stuff – it’s just time code numbers! How difficult can it be to make this work? Avid and Media 100 have been doing it perfectly for at least as long as FCP has been in existence. I worked on an Avid for years, and when you “decomposed” a sequence it just worked.

[Ken Jones]

I shoot on HDV and use an HVR-1500 to capture using HD-SDI and RS-422.
I used Media Manager to “offline” a sequence for re-capture and it assigned 16 channels of audio to all of the master clips. Go figure.

[Ken Jones]

I can’t remember if this applies to FCP 5, but in FCP 6:

Drag your footage from your bin into an empty sequence. If the sequence settings do not match the footage settings (i.e. frame size, frame rate, codec, etc.), FCP will ask (this is from memory and is not exact) “The Sequence settings do match your footage settings. Would you like to change the sequence settings to match your footage settings?”

This is how I ALWAYS configure my sequence settings. It seems to be foolproof.

[Ken Jones]

My latest update:

My RAID only has (had) 900GB of total space: four 250GB drives striped as a RAID 0.

I went out and bought four 1.5TB drives, and now have a total of around 5.5TB of drive space. This gave me enough space to capture all of the footage in HD.

It still irritates me that I have to capture over eleven hours of footage for a four hour sequence…

[Ken Jones]

[Larry Asbell] “If your still looking for a workaround, you would want to somehow discard all the multiclip info which MM can’t seem to do.”

I think I did this. I selected all of the clips in my sequence, Modify>Collapse Multiclips, then Modify>Link (un-link the clips by de-selecting “Link”).

[Larry Asbell] “How about exporting your video only sequence as an EDL then bring it back in to a new project, Media Manage it, and recapture the clips?”

I tried both an EDL and an XML. FCP would not open either and gave me a “General Error”.

[Ken Jones]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I think it has to do with the multiclip aspect. Have you tried to copy and paste the sd sequence to a new sequence in a new project, then running media manger yet? “

As I stated in a previous post, I tried it twice and both times I got the spinning beach ball. I had to force quit after waiting 10 minutes on the first attempt, and 30 minutes on the second.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Next time though, for the offline, just use the dv codec. It’ll save you some space. “

My original plan was to capture in DV anamorphic for my offline, but I have had some MAJOR issues with the HVR-1500 batch capturing reliably. Since my final output is going to be an SD DVD, I decided to capture in SD ProRes Anamorphic in case I was unable to batch capture my on-line in HD. I was finally able to get the HVR-1500 to reliably batch capture – but only by utilizing a 10 second (!) pre-roll. I want to go ahead and edit the program in HD since the producer will probably re-release the DVD in Blu-ray in a couple of years. By doing all the graphics in HD now, I won’t have to re-do everything when it is time to release the Blu-ray disc.

Thanks for your replies.

[Ken Jones]

>That article is kind of old (FCP v4) and a few options and check boxes have changed, although it will get
>you close and the principles remain the same. Another wild card is the multi-clip aspect of it, for which
>that article predates. Copying and pasting the sequence (which has already been suggested) into a new
>project and THEN media managing might get you to where you need to be. I would think your media
>manager window would want to look something like this:

I do realize that article is from 2004. I looked all over the web for a more recent article and even subscribed to Lynda.com to watch a tutorial on Media Manager (which didn’t even go over the “Create Offline” option).

Thanks for posting the screen grab. My window looks exactly the same – except mine has 2:00 handles and uses a Blackmagic HD codec. I dod not have any other boxes checked.

[Ken Jones]

>I hate to say it, but if you had captured everything as HDV via firewire, it would have used less space
>than SD ProRes and there would have been no reason to recapture. However…

If I was editing on a laptop or if my final sequence was going to be cuts only I would have considered using the HDV codec. I have tried editing in HDV and it drove me nuts with how much rendering it required and how sluggish it made my system. My current 8-core Mac Pro equipment setup allows me to work in 1920X1080 with minimal rendering. I am also going to be creating a lot of graphics in After Effects and I find it easier and more reliable to just go ahead work in 1920X1080.

>Did you include all the audio again or just picture, because it might need to recapture the whole tape
>for the audio. There is no need to recapture audio – you already have it. Make a new sequence, copy
>paste your video only tracks and then media manage that. Recapture mute and there should only be the
>pictures you need plus handles, not whole tapes.
>Then copy paste the audio from the original sequence and all should be good.

Good suggestion. I tried this a few days ago and it didn’t change anything. Media Manager created the exact same Master Clips bin. In fact, even though there was not any audio in the sequence all of the clips had either 15 or 16 channels of audio. If this HAD worked – I would have had no choice but to retain all of the media from my offline SD sequence (663 GB of SD ProRes video & audio) because the audio would be linked to the video.

Thanks for the reply.