Does Media Manager add handles to the tail of your copied media?!

Hi all,

Right now we're working with multiple editors on FCP 5.1.4 (I know... we need to upgrade. But we've been working on this project for over 4 years now and the rule is to not upgrade in the middle of a project, right?) and we just got done transferring one new project file from one station to the other simply by copying and pasting the file onto a thumb drive. We've already previously backed up all the original media that's going to be in the project using Media Manager so all we need to do is simply reconnect the media to the new project file. After doing so, we got the "Media Start/Media End" error.

From there, we compared the project file that was copied over on both stations by going through all the sequences and matching up their TC's. They were all on point except for one. Therefore we decided to check all media's start and end points and noticed that while some media matched up exactly, some others had 2+ seconds added to the media end points.

Those media clips that had different end points were (so far...) 1 of 2 things:

1) had some dead frames at the end of it (basically a still that extended beyond the original media end point)

2) had overlapping footage from the beginning of the next clip


And here are our specs:

-Power Mac G5 w/ Mac 0SX 10.4.11

-FCP 5.1.4
-29.97 fps sequence settings

-Shot in SD 24pa (Panasonic DVX-100 - setting F5)


Does anyone have any idea why this is and if there is a solution? Does one of the updated versions of FCP fix this?

Thanks everyone. I appreciate you taking the time to read through this lengthy description of our problem.



Thanks,
Chris Guevarra
massmovementtv.blogspot.com

>and the rule is to not upgrade in the middle of a project, right?

Depends. I would clone the drives and upgrade if I needed the features.


>And here are our specs:
>-29.97 fps sequence settings
>-Shot in SD 24pa (Panasonic DVX-100 - setting F5)

What? For 24pA, you're supposed to remove the duplicate frames on capture, and you edit in a 24 fps sequence.


> We've already previously backed up all the original media that's going to be in the project
>using Media Manager so all we need to do is simply reconnect the media to the new project file.
>After doing so, we got the "Media Start/Media End" error.

Did you assign reel names to your clips when you captured them? Sometimes you get that error message when you're reconnecting clips.



www.strypesinpost.com

hi chris.

you would be a lot better off NOT using the media manager for this job.
simply copy the relevant files across to the new location manually.

hopeful they are not spread all over the place too much.
if they are it would be best to work on fixing that up a bit on your first project, then copy it all to the new drive.

i work with duplicate drives a lot.
it pays to have everything exactly the same on both sets of drives.
all folder structures the same, and even this same drive name used on the drives.
this way you should not need to reconnect at all.

so,
bad news: start again
good news: it will work.


cheers,
nick

Hi strypes,

Thanks for the reply.

>What? For 24pA, you're supposed to remove the duplicate frames on capture, and you edit in a 24 fps sequence.

We've heard from a number of people that it's ok to edit in a 29.97 fps sequence. Could they have screwed us over and totally have been wrong?

>Did you assign reel names to your clips when you captured them? Sometimes you get that error message when you're reconnecting clips.

We did assign reel names to all our clips. That message seems to come up even when we make a direct copy of the clip and reconnect it with everything exactly the same.

Hi Nick,

(also posted on the Cow)

Thank you so much for your response and help.

I think we're deciding that we are going to go ahead and start all over and simply copy the relevant files manually. However, we still would like to consolidate the drives, if possible, because they will be transported from time to time. My question now is...


Will partitioning the new back up drives and renaming each partition to have the same name and folder structure as the original set work?


Thanks again Nick. Your response has been tremendous help.

-Chris

> We've heard from a number of people that it's ok to edit in a 29.97 fps sequence. Could they
> have screwed us over and totally have been wrong?

For 24pA, yes, they were wrong. If you'd wanted the flexibility to edit in 29.97fps, you should have shot 24p, not 24pA.


www.derekmok.com

Dang... thank you so much, Derek, for the reply. Could that possibly be the reason why Media Manager is adding extra frame to the end of all our copied media?

Thanks for all your patience on the newb questions btw.

"Will partitioning the new back up drives and renaming each partition to have the same name and folder structure as the original set work? "

it might work. i've never tried that, but it sounds plausible.

how many drives are you talking about?
if it was me, i'd be trying to consolidate it onto as few drives as possible.

i'm sort of against media manager for this job due to the way i keep my files organised.
ill have captured media in one folder,
music in another, graphics in a third, etc, etc.

if you use Media Manager to copy the files, they all wind up in the one folder.

------
getting the "reels" warning on reconnect means one of two things in my experience:

1. the reel is wrong, which is odd if all you done is copy the file.
2. the clip has no reel#

two other alternatives i can think of:

3. there are two files with the same name, but different reel#s
4. you've tried to add a reel# to an AIFF file. it looked like it was there in FCP, but it wasn't really there on the file.

Speaking of which, i've gotten "media start/end" warnings when reconnecting audio files.
they can be ignored in my experience.


nick