Moving media files on hard drive

Hi,

This might seem elementary ... I've seen a few people mention they don't always trust Media Manager for moving their video clips around on their hard drive, so they do it manually.

Is there a preferred method for doing this kind of regrouping and sorting out, from one capture folder to another?

It seems kind of laborious when you can only open one folder at a time, aside from copying to the desktop or copying and pasting. I can't figure out how to open several folders at once, or move things around from column to column like you can on a PC.

Hope this makes sense ...

Thanks.

You can go to column view in any window by with apple-3.

Also, you can open multiple windows, just go back to the hard drive and open the second one.

So, you can open the applications folder and the documents folder at the same time by going to your hard drive and double clicking applications, and then double clicking the hard drive again and double click the documents folder. Two windows, no waiting.

> This might seem elementary ... I've seen a few people mention they don't always trust Media Manager for moving their video clips around on their hard drive, so they do it manually.
Is there a preferred method for doing this kind of regrouping and sorting out, from one capture folder to another?

> It seems kind of laborious when you can only open one folder at a time,
> aside from copying to the desktop or copying and pasting.

It's not laborious if you have a certain kind of file management. In my case, every single one of my projects resides on one master folder containing *everything* -- project file, clips, render files, graphics, audio -- organized into sub-folders. So if I need to move a project from one drive to another, I drag one folder. Similarly for media -- if I'm using two drives for media, there is one clips folder on each drive. Easy to deal with in Finder.

But if you're asking whether there is a "best" way to move media, nobody can tell you. If you're as good with Media Manager as Nick Meyers is, Media Manager probably would be faster. But it's a fact that when you use Media Manager to move, copy or (God forbid) replace media, sometimes things go haywire even if you do everything perfectly. The Finder is much more predictable -- you probably wouldn't get a single non-user-sanctioned result in a million operations.

> I can't figure out how to open several folders at once, or move things around
> from column to column like you can on a PC.

This is another preference thing, but I always use the window view, and I always set Finder Preferences to open every window in a new window. It's harder to drop something into the wrong place, I find. Most people like the column view; I find it cumbersome and slow since it generates previews I rarely want. Like Jude said, "horses for courses".

Many thanks for the info.

Do you store a project's music and stills etc. on your internal system drive or is it OK to have all that stuff on your media drive as well?

I always thought you got better performance if only the video clips were on your media drive, and everything else on your system drive. (Maybe that's outdated PC-think.)

Paul

> I always thought you got better performance if only the video clips were on
> your media drive, and everything else on your system drive. (Maybe that's
> outdated PC-think.)

For one thing, system drives are not a good place to store *anything* big. It fragments your bootup disk and can cause problems with the computer and applications. You should use an internal non-system drive if you want to use that system.

I don't use that system, period, but different people will have different habits. Many people on here swear by a system where they use external drives/SATA arrays to store captured media, while retaining graphics templates and project files on internal drives. I don't do that, however, because I'm a freelancer -- at the end of a project, I tend to hand the files back to the client/producer. So I keep my project files on external drives. External drives die a lot more easily than internal ones, but I'm in no danger because I backup manually every two hours or so to a USB flash drive, in addition to having an Autosave Vault sent to my internal drive.

> Do you store a project's music and stills etc. on your internal system drive or
> is it OK to have all that stuff on your media drive as well?

If you have a healthy backup system, there's nothing wrong with storing everything associated with a project on an external drive. In fact, I never reference any media that's on my system drive. Even if I'm inserting my own customized countdown and slate, which are my signature and don't change from project to project, I would copy them to the project's external drive before importing into the project file. That way nothing goes offline if you move the drive somewhere else. On a multi-editor show where I was Chief Editor, I've seen so many editors who handed me their shows on the drives...only to have graphics backgrounds, text, fonts and plugins go offline because they had been too lazy to copy their materials to the drive first. So I had to either change what they'd done or wait for them to send me the missing files.

One more on file management if I may ...

I'm in the FCP timeline and export a clip out as a still using Quicktime conversion. When I go to save the new still, my choice of destination folder seems very limited. All I seem to get is main things like Documents or Final Cut Pro. If I have a folder within a folder somewhere for Stills for the actual project, I can't seem to burrow down to get to it. So I just save in Documents or some broad thing like that, then have to go back to Finder and shuffle that file around manually into the appropriate folder.

Am I missing something really basic here? Surely there must be a way to get exactly to the folder you want to save something into it at the outset.

Thanks again for all the help. The everyday usefulness of this forum continues to amaze me.

Paul

hmmmm dunno what would be causing that???

EXCEPT...

there is a little blue arrow at the end of the "Save As ___________" line. if that arrow is pointing down - there lies your problem.

click it and all will be peacefull...

oh, and as far as file management goes, read the following thread:

[www.lafcpug.org]

So basic but so important.

Thanks everyone. Now I can organize my head off.


Now pardon me while I go move any project stuff off of my system drive and on to my 2nd internal drive.

Paul

coming in late (and thanks for the plug, derek!):

i think the MM troubles start when you ask it to trim the media.
-if you are using it to copy WHOLE FILES then you wont get the speed issues.
-also, if you;re working with while files, there's no need to request a new project file.
your existing one will connect perfectly,
so that;s another thing that may help you avoid problems

IMPORTANT: even if you are moving whole files, use COPY mode, not MOVE
MOVE will delete the original files after they've been copied.
i just reckon COPY is safest, as you can check the process has worked, then delete the originals yourself.
that, too can be done from within FCP using the "Make Offline" window

if your media is spread all over the place, then MM will find it all for you
and copy it to one new location

one thing, though:
sometime you have media in different places for some personal organisational reason.
you may have separate folders for music, or stills.
when you use MM to move them .. er, sorry, COPY them,
and if you chose to copy them all in the one process, they will all wind up in the one folder.
which will be:
Nominated Location/Media/Project Name.
(if that;s not to your liking, change or simplify it before you reconnect)

you could handle your clips, music, and still in separate MM operations,
or you could live with this.
makes no difference to FCP if all those files are all jumbled in with each other.

(unless there are thousands upon thousands of them: some people i know still worry about the number of files a folder can contain. but i've had close to 1,800 files in one place and it wasn't an issue)

all the best,
nick