bad clips

I just ran into a problem which I do not know the solution. We have a project we've been working on a G5 tower. We are out of town and took the hard drive with us, and were hoping to work on my laptop. When we started up the project, a large number of clips refused to be reconnected, it seems all of them sound or graphics. The video clips show up as being there online, but several of them show up in the bin and in the sequence as black (no image), a couple even as part image and part black. Does anyone know what to do about this?
Thanks.

Do you have the same codecs on your laptop as you do on your tower? We need a lot more info. What is teh codec for these clips? What kind of "hard drive" and connection? FW800? eSATA?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Sounds like a render-files issue. If, as you say, the clips aren't actually marked offline, then they're probably not. I bet for whatever reason the Final Cut system on your laptop has gotten confused about whether it still has access to the render files that were on your G5. Go to the Tools menu, open the Render Manager and delete all render files, the re-render your whole timeline. I wouldn't be surprised if that fixes it.

(For the record, when working on a laptop it's best to keep the render files on your external framestore, along with your media files. FCP defaults to putting the render files on your system disk, which on a laptop is usually too slow for real work. So you might need to relocate the render-files directory on your laptop first, then do what I suggested above.)

framestore = hard drive (btw )

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Thanks, Joey. Yes, "framestore" means the storage device ? firewire, RAID, whatever ? where you store your media files. I think Avid people refer to it as a "media drive," but I could be wrong about that.

grafixjoe Wrote:
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> Do you have the same codecs on your laptop as you
> do on your tower? We need a lot more info. What is
> teh codec for these clips? What kind of "hard
> drive" and connection? FW800? eSATA?


RIght now I am on DV NTSC 48 kHz. I believe the tower had the same set up.
I am using two hardrives, the main one being a LaCie, using a 6 pin firewire.

> but several of them show up in the bin and in the sequence as black (no image), a couple even
> as part image and part black.

That doesn't sound like a codec issue to me. If a codec is missing, then you won't get partial images.

Try this first: Re-import one of the problematic files into the Browser. Cut it back into the sequence by hand, using timecodes. Does it behave as the old clip does?


www.derekmok.com

That didn't work but still using your advise, I went to the clip and clicked "view in finder". It so happens that the clip is a sub-clip of a larger one, renamed. maybe when transferring these files, I did not transfer a folder from my hard-drive into the external drive that had some of these. So I imported the whole clip and have been replacing it, cutting it back into the sequence by hand as you suggested, using timecodes. I have about 30 or so clips that way, which is just really time consuming doing one by one but hey, it is working. And since I am out of town, I am happy to see that the media is here with me and that I can go on. Thank you and thank you all for helping.