[Rikki Blow]

Thanks guys. I think Mads’ solution (creating a timeline with all clips) will prob work best for me, as the original libraries are scattered a bit, and the ideal would be to consolidate everything into one much bigger library in a way that preserves access to all previous projects, but lets me get rid of all the smaller libraries once I’m satisfied everything’s working OK.

[Rikki Blow]

Thanks, but if I have some clips which I didn’t use in Projects in the smaller Libraries, but which I may need in the longer combined project, I guess they’re not going to come across using this method?

[Rikki Blow]

With my 1080 footage, FCP was obviously a big drain on the battery, and four hours on an M1 sounds amazing!! I’d be looking at around a max of a couple of hours battery power when full on editing my 1080 footage with some grading and transitions and occasional other effects. But the jump to a few minutes on 4k is rather unexpected.

I’ll try playing around with settings and see if I can get ProRes out of the camera – I was using the 4k 10bit 72M 25p setting which obviously compresses some – maybe that was a false economy.

[Rikki Blow]

Old 1080 footage runs fine – seems like the only change is the camera file format – what concerns me is that the change seems rather disproportionate.

I haven’t come across ‘Coconut Battery’.

[Rikki Blow]

Certainly the playback could be expected re 4k, fair enough, though I was hoping my laptop would handle at least a single 4k stream as it’s the 2.9GHz, has the Radeon Pro 460 graphics card and 16Gb memory.

Battery wise, I’ve checked with activity monitor now, and can see that there is a massive drain going on during playback for a process called VTDecoderXPCService.

Just playing back my file in FCPX atm I’m dropping battery down to 50% in a couple of minutes, but when I stop playback, the percentage recovers to around 90%, so it seems to be predictive rather than actual, and this at least explains why after laptop shut down, when I reconnect charger, the battery shows 60%.

The article on battery power is all fairly syraightforward, and as mentioned before, my system profile is telling me it’s got a cycle count or 330 and health is normal.

[Rikki Blow]

Not keen on Big Sur as I have a lot of plug-ins, quite a few of which might not yet be ready, and versions of FCPX above my current one don’t offer me much other than Big Sur compatibility. Apart from this one issue, now resolved, I have a very smoothly running system I’m happy not to mess with.

[Rikki Blow]

Wow, thanks for all the analysis, links and suggestions. Much appreciated.

I think I was so used to what you describe as ‘inode’ lookup working flawlessly, that I assumed I could just drag stuff from one library to another and it would sort itself out, and clearly there was something about the way I was proceeding that caused the problem.

I think I’ve worked out the practical cause – I’d drag a project over, ticking the ‘without media’ option, but as well as the project it would bring unlinked named files with it. My assumption, based on previous flawless experience, was that when I drag across the relative events (WITH original media), everything would link up OK, so then I deleted the apparently unlinked versions and assumed the project would find the right files in the right folders. But for whastever reason (maybe due to disc format or something else), the linking went awry, and I seem to have ended up with some original media in the project folder, while FCPX is convinced it should be in the event folder.

I did try pulling the files out of the package contents project folder to desktop and then relinking and consolidating – one of the fixes you suggest – but this is where it got weird, because although I kept fixing stuff like this, each app restart would throw up random unlinked ones again.

After a talk through with a nice chap from Apple, we decided to rebuild the master library from scratch with a workaround method, while he consults engineers. He agreed I wasn’t doing anything particularly weird and FCPX wasn’t playing fair with what I was trying to do, and he’s going to get back to me next week, but here’s how it’s worked for now.

For each small library, I first select events I want to bring into the new master library, and I copy them WITH original media. One complication is that I often use a starter template library which has a few compound clips for logos etc, and I don’t want to have multiple folders in the new library with these, so I’ll leave them behind.

Next, I select the projects I want, and use the File menu comman – copy to library selecting ‘without media’. This will bring over the projects, but because the events folders are already in place, it’s not dragging a whole load of files with it (which was the source of my problem before). If it has brought anything over that I’d missed (and those pesky repeated compound clips), I throw them into the events as required (including a generic ‘Compounds’ event for the logo repeats).

Doing it in this order seems to have kept everything neat and without problems. I’ve ended up with 30 or so projects from their original libraries, which I’ve numbered, and then I’ve matched the numbering and have all their original event folders still in place, ie 001 footage, 001 stills, 001 compounds, 001 music, 001 graphics, 002 footage and so on.

This is all I ever wanted and it seemed crazy I couldn’t just drag the projects over without media, drag all the events folders over, and for FCPX not to be able to work it out for itself, but doing it in the specific order one by one seems to have resolved it.

If I get any more info from Apple I’ll post it here in case anyone else comes across similar issues.

Thanks again Joe for your care, time and input.

[Rikki Blow]

Opening the library on the new MacOS Extended Journaled disc, there were, once again a few files missing from one of the events. When I try to relink, the pathname points to the ‘Original Edits’ folder in the library on the new disc. As mentioned above, inspecting package content reveals there’s a whole load of media sitting in that folder that doesn’t show up on the browser. The browser is only showing the projects, which is what I WANT that event to hold. (Before you ask ‘All Clips’ IS selected in browser). The missing media is in an event where I want all the footage for that particular project, and inspecting the package contents of that folder, I can see that the supposedly missing clip actually IS there.

As an experiment, in the relink dialogue, I selected the library (since I know the media is in there), and after a little search, it comes up OK as found and ready to link, but when I finish linking, it still shows as a missing file.

The only way I’ve found to fix it, is to drag a copy of the missing file out of the package contents folder onto my desktop, relink it there, consolidate the library, and all seems fine.

The maddening problem is that next time I open the project, a few other files will have gone AWOL in the same way, seemingly randomly. They can all be fixed the same way, but another relaunch and a new set of problems.

AAARGH!

Unless someone’s got an idea what’s going on here, I think I need to start from scratch rebuilding a new library from all the older smaller ones, but I’d love pointers about the smoothest way to do that as I don’t need any more glitches or to spend to much time doing so.

[Rikki Blow]

Hi Joe

I wasn’t aware of this requirement re drive format, and yes the SanDisc is exFAT.

I’m not confident this is the issue as I’ve realised one of my main 4Tb archive discs is exFAT with many dozens of libraries on it all running fine.

However, I’m copying on to a back up disc, will reformat the SSD as MacOS Extended Journaled and let you know if that helps once I’ve copied back.

re Relinking – it’s always showing it’s looking for the file within the new large library, not other discs or libraries. As mentioned above, on inspecting package contents I’ve seen a lot files are sitting in the original media folder of my Projects folder, but they don’t show up in the browser.

AS A DIFFERENT APPROACH so I can move on, does anyone have suggestions of how they would go about combining a load of smaller libraries into one larger one – maybe there was something about my methodology that confuses FCPX, so I’d be very interested how others would approach this in a painless and orderly way.

[Rikki Blow]

Trid that on the off chance, but no cure I’m afraid. I was sceptical because I’ve always created an event called PROJECTS in all my smaller libraries and never had these problems before.

The weird thing is that when a file is reported as missing, mostly if I open up pacakge contents and look in the original media of that event, it IS actually there. So I drag a copy out, relink, reconsolidate, and it’s sorted (until the next time).

My PROJECTS/ORIGINAL EDITS folder only appears to have projects in it in the browser, but if I look in the Original Media folder of that ‘event’ I can see that dozens of media files are sitting there too, doubling up om where they’re supposed to be. I don’t know if this is connected to my issues, or why they are there.