Media Manager: How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways!

The context:
74 min documentary finally (almost) picture locked. Need to give it to the colorist who is gonna color it in FCP so that I am not locked to the current edit.

My thought process:
Use media manager to give him the project, then he can give me back the project file which i can reconnect to the media on my local RAID.

My biggest mistake:
Not really knowing how media mnager works or testing the worfkflow before hanging the entire project on it.

The results:
when MM copied the footage to the external drive, it created NEW clips with NEW names BASED on the old names. So when i brought the sequence back onto my system and tried to reconnect, i had to manually connect all the clips! over 74 mintes that's a ;ot of clips. i literally didn;t sleep last night.

Beware of MM - kn ow how to use it and try it before you committ.

greg

Quote

My biggest mistake:
Not really knowing how media mnager works or testing the worfkflow before hanging the entire project on it.

Well...there it is. Is this post a rant or a question?

There's nothing wrong with Media Manager...it pretty much rocks. It's a powerful tool that I use every day to manage projects over our LAN from a Producer's machine to mine. Don't know what you mean by "created new clip names based on old clip names". That's never happened to me.

Joey

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

it is neither a rant nor a question
it is more a friendly warning

glad that you are reading this thread, bc if this has never happened to you, you are as ignorant of MM as i was two days ago, and i wouldn;t want you to end up in the same bind as me (hence the purpose of this thread)

if you use MM to copy material to a drive, and tell it to "delete unused media from duplicated clip" (which seems logical when you;re talking about 60 hours of source footage), it creates new clips with new names.
ie: if you are copying a clip named "larry returns" the new, media managed clip, will be titled "larry returns 1"

makes it hard to reconnect when someone gives you back a new project file

and, for the record, i never said "there was something wrong with MM", but thanks for erroneously suggesting that i blamed someone else for my mistake
:-)
(as i said, didn;t sleep much last night, so i am in a pissy mood)

Unless you tell it to use the assigned clip name from the browser rather than the media file. If there are multiple instances of the file made into clips they have to be named something.

They should reconnect directly from media manager in the new project file.

Quote

if this has never happened to you, you are as ignorant of MM as i was two days ago

Nope...I am not ignorant of MM. Like I said...I use it every day (for years) and never came across your issue NOT because I am ignorant of the program, but because I know how the settings work. TW has nailed it above (which is what I do)..."Base media file names on clip names" (in the browser - if you changed them from their originals) "or on existing file names" (which is what you did - which will change your clip names).

Quote

and, for the record, i never said "there was something wrong with MM"

True. Retracted. I just don't want people to be "scared" of the Media Manager. It DOES ROCK.

...now GET SOME SLEEP

Joey

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Greg, you are right and wrong.

First of all, you were doing a simple project move. While Joe and Nick would be first in line to tell you that you can do that with Media Manager to accomplish that task, it probably would have been even easier if you had just copied the folder in OS. There was no reason for you to mess with the file names or do any trimming operations.

Media Manager does have other bugs. But that's not a bug in your case -- it's user error. Unfortunately, as you wrote yourself, you hadn't thought through the process enough and used the wrong tool for the job.

Any tool in FCP can mangle your project if used improperly (for example, something as simple as Disconnect Media, SHIFT-D, which I use repeatedly on every project and have never had a glitch). But when you're tackling a feature you've never touched, always, always, always backup your important files first, and never just click "OK" to see what happens if you don't know what it does. It could be the "Nuclear Launch" button and you can't take some of these things back.


www.derekmok.com

MM is not that hard.
The Heart of the Media Manager is the "Media" section.

and within here, there are THREE CONTROLS that are most important:

- the "Mode" Pulldown (Copy, Move, etc)
- Delete Unused (or not)
- Base Media File Names on: (Clip or File names)

get your head around these three things, and that's half the batle won.
knowing how FCP connects to Media is the other half**.

FCP connects to Media via FILE NAME,

so to create new media that you want to share between 2 systems, and that you will need to re-link to, you have to ensure that the FILE NAMES dont change.

to that end, the big three would be:

-COPY MODE to make the new media
-DONT DELETE UNUSED
(if you've used a clip more than once, FCP creates multiple new files, and has to give them new names)
-BASE MEDIA FILE NAMES ON: FILE NAMES


cheers,
nick

**like Jerry Seinfeld's shirt which was half cotton, half silk, half polyester,
the third half of MM is the rest of controls, like asking for a project, etc.