[Tangier Clarke]

Bill and Eugene, thanks for the input. I’m no stranger to dealing with databases (MySQL, Postgre, Access, etc.), so I understand your points Bill about the importance of doing it the FCP X way. It seems like one of the large issues is being able to point FCP X to where the reel(s) resides.

After a shoot, I take the cards (which when mounted on the desktop are all called “Untitled” or No “Name”), create new folders on our backup hard drive(s) with unique consecutive name (per camera if necessary for multicam shoots). These are our backups.

Ex –
projShortName-camX-01
projShortName-camX-02
projShortName-camX-01[H4N Audio]
.
.
. etc

These are the reels on the backup drives I’d want to point FCP X to. This is the media that’s transcoded for editorial and [the transcoded clips] will be deleted once the project is finished and mastered.

Creating those archives, though it works, takes up space, time, etc. And the thought of having to create a finder level archive that isolates Finder folders and elements to FCP X and away from other apps is disconcerting, but it seems necessary. It seems the only other way for other apps to (for example) review content in those archives (assuming the archives replace the original reel backups above, rather than doubling the space taken up) is to first invoke the OS level “Show package contents” or open the archive. Talk about walled garden.

Makes me want a way to make “trick” the OS in to thinking the folders above are archives just by changing the extension on the folder (if there was one) like you would a file such as a word doc, text file, or video file type.

Where’s ResEdit when I need it!

Definitely, If I could just tell FCP X where the reels are without the archiving process that would be ideal. The ID can stay in the event database as it should and content can be reimported and assigned to the same id as long as FCP X checks metadata in the backup against what’s already in the event database so there’s a one to one relationship to what it was on the first import and what it needs to be [again] on any successive import.

Side note: we’re noticing a problem with reimporting that FCP X is having trouble relinking files because the timestamp in FCP X clip name is literally 1 hour off from when the original project was created, so it thinks it’s not the right clip to connect.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

Full reinstall of the OS and apps. Still rebuilding. Though others in the office are having some issues with spotlight since the last MacOS 10.8 update.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

Thanks Jeremy. I was afraid I’d get that very response. That’s one of the methods we’ve been using – duplicating the project and clips only for the final project. I was hoping to do this differently, but it seems that’s not built into FCP X in any way right now.

T

[Tangier Clarke]

Yeah, I did all of that – using terminal, turning indexing off, trashing index file using Onyx app, restarting index yesterday, etc. I was surprised to see this indexing issue show up again on it’s own.

Thanks for your help though.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

Perhaps a fresh install of Mountain Lion and FCP X is in order.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

It only keeps reindexing my boot drive.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

I do have copy files to event folder on, but still it’s sssllllooooowww. FCP X has always seemed slow to me controlling Finder level processes than the actual Finder. It’s been one of those weird things.

Drive 2 Read Write = 118MB/s, 116.4MB/s
Drive 3 Read/Write = 134MB/s, 130MB/s

using Blackmagics speed test

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

No card structures at the root level. But here goes my spotlight reindexing again. Yesterday I went through the process of reindexing after clearing the index and doing a couple other things to get Spotlight healthy again. It looks like this weird and irregular reindexing is back.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

The app is only on the boot drive. Raw card folders are on my third hard drive, importing to the event folder on my 2nd hard drive.

At 9 am FCP X was importing clip 6 of 336
now at 11:08 am it’s on clip 19.

Looks like it’s importing and transcoding at the same time.

Not sure what else of the rundown you mean. Activity monitor has FCP X taking up most of my CPU (to be expected – 780 % or so – that’s weird)

Apple mail is open, FxFactory loaded, iMessage open two monitors on A/V output turned off.

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

Yes. And I forgot to mention my system specs:

Mac Pro 2×2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
16 GB RAM
Mac OS 10.8.2
ATI Radeon HD 5770
FCP X 10.0.7
BlackMagic Multibridge Pro 2