[William Schelhas]

Thanks for the replies. They have been a help. I went to Best Buy the other day and got an Apple Adapter for SD Cards but they were out of the USB-C to USB-A(?). I have to make a trip out to an Apple Store to get one of those. They are a little further away. I was concerned that It was the power thing, or my concern that the weight of the dock and a hard drive were putting stress on the connection that has been making the drives disconnect.

As for the fcpbundle file, I have started to use my habits from FCP7 when editing with FCPX. That is, I create a folder for every project. In this case, on my desktop rather than a hard drive. I put all my assets into those folders then import them into my project. From Reading Larry Jordan’s tutorial, it seems that I might have some unnecessary redundancy with that. When I Import Media into a Library or Project in FCPX, it might be getting converted and saved in the fcpbundle but I also have it in the projects folder. That would explain why one of my projects is 400gig for 2 1:30 speeches. There was a Powerpoint, a conversion to JPG and an mp4 video clip. What I have encountered thus far is that the project is being saved into my Movies file and not in that folder that I created. So, before moving the project off of the new Macbook Pro, I have been moving the fcpbundle file into that folder. On the last project I did, I realized that I could actually tell FCPX to save the bundle to the project’s folder on the desktop. I might just keep doing that to save myself from having to move files around. Also, my entire project, theoretically, should be contained in the one folder which I can more easily share with others or between computers.

My theory here is that by keeping all my materials and the fcpbundle in the folder on the desktop, I can just turn on my Macbook and edit and not have to connect all the peripherals every time. Less clutter and easier to do in confined places. But, the downside is the HD space. I now wish I had ordered my Macbook and gotten the 2tb drive rather than buying it on the spot at The Apple Store where I was limited to only 1 tb. An order with 2 tb would have taken 10 days to receive. As I mentioned, I seem to be limited to about 4 projects at a time in the space I have available. Fortunately, that seems to be the most I would have to deal with but this last couple months has been exceptionally busy and I now have a 5th project that I can’t start until I can purge 2 or 3 of the ones that I have just finished.

Now I am going to go through the FCPX Preferences to see how I have it handling imports. I think I have keep in place selected but from opening up the fcpbundle file on my old MacBook, it looks like the files like jpgs and logos. music and Digital Juice stuff is all in the bundle file. ???

[William Schelhas]

Thanks for your reply. I am actually just using a macBOOK Pro. I have this one which is 2018 High Sierra and another which is 2013 Mavericks which I have as a legacy machine to use QT 7 Pro, FCP 7 an Adobe CS5.1 suite… and some other stuff. Not like I have something more powerful to make the modifications from Proxy etc. Not now anyway. I lost my regular job a little over a year ago through downsizing and they closed my department. I have gone off on my own and am contracting and just building up my resources for myself. Most of my stuff is pretty small scale and my real issue comes down to freeing up space on this machine to start new stuff. With 1 tb internal I have been able to get about 4 projects on here before I now have to off load my old stuff to make room for new projects. I got down to about 20g left. The last couple months was particularly busy and now I have a little backup. I just don’t want to dump the old projects, in case I have to revisit them or use something as a template for a new project. I am trying to figure out how best to archive the old finished stuff and if there are other files that I need to search for or if everything is in the fcpbundle. I know there must be better ways to do this but I am so shell shocked and afraid of hooking up Hard Drives and crashing them as right out of the box, this machine or the hub trashed 2 Hard drives. One full of material that I have yet to recover. Something about corrupted B tree. I just bought an APPLE USB-C to SD adapter but they did not have any USB-C to USB at the time. So, I am taking one project at a time and copying it to a 128 g SD and then putting it into my other computer which has a SD Slot to archive onto a Portable hard Drive. That is until I get to my last project which is about 400g and I will have to sweat it with a Hard Drive through the IOGEAR hub. As I mentioned, I am trying to confirm if the fcpbundle contains everything. I opened one on a copy that I transferred to my old Macbook External Drive and it does seem to contain an Event File, Analysis, Shared Items, Original Media, Render Files, Motion Templates, FlexoLibrary, Current Verasion and Settings along with a couple other files. Again, thanks for your information. One of my next efforts is to definitely work out a Raid setup to backup my stuff. Perhaps the thing to do would be to come up with a USB-C connection to whatever input to a RAID instead of backing up to these portable drives.

[William Schelhas]

Here’s another one. Having 2 projects open, Last Week and This week, I was taking Lower 3rds and Titles and Music and other items from the previous project and copying them onto the new one. I am not sure I was going about that right. Is there anything I should know about copy and past… stuff from one project, as a template?

[William Schelhas]

Thanks for the replies. I will look into your suggestions. They are important as I am learning this stuff on the fly and find that I have to rethink a lot of old ways of doing stuff. As it is, I have a real messed up situation. How much of it relates to these problems and what is related and what is not, I don’t know. Seems my Hard Drive was going bad. I started having other issues, like this,

Here, even though all the video was fine on my SD card, It was importing with these “Black Holes” In it. I then noticed an odd file on the Hard Drive, something to the effect of Bad or Corrupt Files. In there was a copy of the clip that I mentioned above. Then, as I was putting the final ending on the program, FCPX froze. I had to Force Quit and when I re-booted the computer and FC I got an error that permissions were denied that I was already working on the project on my computer. I tried going into Get Info and changing the permissions. Something was messed up that when I unlocked the drive I could NOT change the
Everyone to Read and Write. That was followed by a message that the Hard Drive could not be repaired by OSX.

In the end, I stayed up all night starting back from square one. That is when I noticed something. Pardon if my terminology is off here. I originally setup with a “Library” Named for my client. Then, I setup “Events” for the dates of the individual debates. Followed by a “Project” for the actual edit. Last week, I had little trouble, other than the learning curve of having to look up stuff from my old FCP7 and try to figure out how to do it in FCPX. No render or pinwheels. Then, I created another Event and Project for the new debate that I shot on Sunday. The first hour of the program was fine. It was when I got into the second hour, and, incidentally, when I was editing the bad footage with the aforementioned “Black Holes” that I couldn’t do anything without triggering the pinwheel. When I started the new project, I had 1 library, 2 Event and 2 Project open. Where, before, I had 1 library, 1 Events and 1 Projects. Could it be that having 2 events and projects open was causing trouble?

[William Schelhas]

Thanks to my wife for helping me find a solution. I had been racking my brain for whatI can use or buy without having to go the gaffers tape route. That is what I use at work for our DSR 300 cameras when the rubber pieces went missing from the original Sony mics. And yes, it does get messy at times.

Anyway. She pointed out, maybe, bunion pads at Walgreens, then remembered that I had some foam tubing left from my Podiatrist. The podiatrist gave me this tubing to cut, and slip over a toe to soften the pressure on a callus that I had. I cut about an inch and a half piece and slipped it over the mic. It was still a little loose so I doubled it up and it works great. No adhesive to gum things up. Just a thin foam tube.

[William Schelhas]

Another Update. I started a scan of the DVD yesterday, using ISOBuster on an old PC. It took over 24 hours and didn’t get past 17%. Now, about 2 hours later, I look over and it seems to be flying. It is now at 51%. This might show some promise. Fingers are crossed.

[William Schelhas]

OK, I pulled out my old PC and have done a FREE download of ISOBuster. I don’t know if this will work. It recognized the DVD and I started a scan for lost files. It is sitting at 16% and has been there for about 10 minutes. I have another show to record in about an hour. I guess I will just leave it and pray that it works.

[William Schelhas]

Command S does not save to Autosave. It actually saves to your FCP Project file. It is just saving your project. Which you want to do from time to time anyway. Autosave is different in that it will allow you, if you find you don’t like something and want to go back, or if you crash, You can find a file that will allow you to go back and not have to start over. Keep in mind that depending on your settings, you may only have so many autosaves before it starts to erase the oldest to replace with a newer.

[William Schelhas]

OH, and a reminder. People around my office always forget this. It is especially important if you are sharing a computer with others. When you leave your project and come back to it later, or if you have moved to another project and come back, always check in System Settings to make sure your file locations are correct. I can’t tell you how many times I have had someone come to me in a panic because they can’t find their stuff. I then open System Settings and find that they are saving their autosaves and capture scratches to other peoples folders or to the folders of another project. Or they open their project file and find an older version when they know they saved it recently. Answer? They saved to the wrong folder.

[William Schelhas]

At the top of your FCP Project you will see the words Final Cut Pro. Click on that. Under there you will see System Settings. Click there. That will tell you where your project is saving to. When I start a new project on FCP 7 I always go through the following routine. Open System settings, as mentioned above. Set a location where you want to save your project in the top pane of the window. I usually use portable external hard drives that I have formatted as Mac OS Journaled, I think. On the hard drive create a file where you want your project to be saved and put that in the first line of the pane under Scratch Discs. You can set several different drives for different projects but the drives have to all be attached. Or you will get errors that your drive isn’t found. I usually only have 1 there anyway. Click all the checkmarks next to your folder that you have set. Then, underneath, you will see, Waveform, Thumbnail and Autosave. Select the same location to save those. Now you have established a single location for all your components of your project to be saved in the same place. If you open that folder, you will see all the FCP Files. Capture Scratch holds all your video clips, autosave vault will hold all your autosaves in a folder with the name of your project. Now, that you have set these file locations, open your project and give it a name under Save Project AS. This should save in the same location as all your other project files. The upside to doing this is that ALL components of your project can be in one folder that is easy to share, backup or copy to other drives etc. Just copy that one folder to a new drive. Also, when you get other assets, say music, logos, jpgs, artwork, or even videos, make sure you save everything into that same folder so that it is ALL self contained. Then, in your FCP Project, in the window that shows all your sequences and bins, click and select IMPORT under the FILE menu. Go to your project folder and IMPORT your assets into your project.