Reconnecting Media

Some friends of mine have just switched to FCS from DPS Velocity at their Animation company.

They've got off to a bad start and have ended up with 270 GB's of mainly media files on their 300 GB boot drive. The second drive is almost empty.

No problem, i thought, i'll move the media folders into the Capture Scratch folder on the second drive and reconnect. Except i can't reconnect. Or at least i can only reconnect one file at a time.

I do this kind of stuff all the time without any problems so i assumed it would be easy. Another problem is that they have thousands of TIF's in groups in individual folders, so it's not simply a question of highlighting the clips and reconnecting.

Any idea how i can help these guys out? Their boot drive is going to explode,and their brand new top of the range mac pro is struggling.

> i'll move the media folders into the Capture Scratch folder on the second drive and reconnect

Hmm. Reconnection issues may be caused by illegal file names. Recently, I just shifted over a TB of footage, and I don't really have an issue reconnecting, but I am quite anal about file naming, especially on larger projects.

On the other hand, you can try using MM to shift the files (copy). However, they may be a little flakey if you're using lots of illegal characters.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks Strypes

It did occur to me to use Media Manager, and if it was my system at home i would have. But these guys are in the middle of a high end TV commercial and i've heard bad stories about the MM, even though it's always been good for me.

What do you mean by illegal file names?

Certain characters like .!@#%&* are used by the OS for file extensions, scripting, etc.. We normally refer to these as illegal characters and they sometimes create problems when reconnecting media.

MM may be less problematic if you're shifting files between drives.



www.strypesinpost.com

It's not likely that every single file they're using is being used in an edit. So I'd suggest only reconnecting the files that are being used in an edit. Leave the unused files disconnected and simply re-import them afresh after you fix their file management.

Usually problems with Media Manager are caused by human error. But if you're really worried, then backup their entire 300GB onto an external drive (which really isn't that much -- I had 2.5TB of media for one 60-second spot alone the last two weeks), keep the backup safe, and that way you can do anything you want on their drive and you'll be covered.

One more word of caution: I think it's bad form to keep TIFFs, timecoded video clips, non-timecoded media clips, audio files etc. on the same Capture Scratch folder. While that speeds up reconnection, it also means you're mixing files that are expendable and files that aren't. Plus, if you do have thousands of files, it'll be an unholy mess in there. You should still do some sort of file segregation -- just make it a nice logical system. Yes, 1000 TIFFs in 500 folders is bad organization, but so is 500 video clips and 1000 music files in one folder.

> What do you mean by illegal file names?

If your guys used a "/" in a file name, for example: "nice picture/little kid.tiff", then during FCP's reconnection process it would probably interpret "nice picture" as a drive path, rather than a part of the file name. So it would try to look for a TIFF file named just "little kid.tiff" and it won't find it. A frequent symptom of this kind of problem is that during Reconnect Media, the path or file name FCP is showing is blank.


www.derekmok.com

Ok, well i'm paying another visit next week so i'll sort it all out. Copying the whole drive to an external first seems like a good idea.

Many thanks Derek and Strypes.

D

2 things to note:

1. It's best that the name in FCP reflects the name of the actual file, so you know what you're reconnecting to. There's the "rename clip to match file" option which could help you out here.

2. Make a copy of the FCP project file BEFORE the media goes offline in FCP. And make sure you know the exact path of the files, so if anything goes wrong, you pop those files back to original file structure and path, and reopen your back up copy of the FCP project file. Then work again from there.



www.strypesinpost.com