Media manager behaves badly with clip names over 25 characters

The media manager messes up pretty bad, when you have clip names over 25 characters. It gives you a warning when it comes to a clip whose name will be longer than 25 characters, which is Okay. But when you tell it to "Skip" the clip, it goes ahead and recompresses it anyway! Spends hours creating corrupt files and offline clips. Not useful.

Worse, it reaches back into your EXISTING PROJECT and snips off the excess characters from your EXISTING CLIP NAMES. Whaaat! FCP should never ever ever change your existing clip names.

Finally, it mangles the new source name for the offline clip it creates, so you end up with the worst of all possible cases - your existing files names have their last few characters missing, and your new offline source files are named wrong, for recapture.

For instance, I MMed 3 clips, with the following names:
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-01
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-02
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-03

I did a Recompress to ORT> Delete Unused > Use Clip Names > Dupe project, from a single DV master clip that had DV Start/Stop run on it, and the subclips renamed.

The MM gave me warning that it encountered error 34, and could proceed, and gave me the oprion of skipping the offending clip (but still making an offline clip of it, in the new project,) and all others like it. I said OK, and the MM still kept chugging away.

After it was done, I notice that all my ORIGINAL clips in the project I was MMing are now all 3 named:
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-

YIKES!

As well, the clips in the NEW project are named the same, and are offline. Worse, when I display the Source column in the browser, and sort by Media Start, i see that it has wrongly named the source files. If i recapture, i'll be screwed.

For instance,
01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-03 becomes 01234 56789 ABCDE FGHIJ 01234-2. IOWs, what used to be Clip 3 is now Clip 2. This is not at all useful, and could all but ruin a large complex project.

Funny thing is, I look in the new Media file, and ALL THE MMed clips are there, pretty as please, with their long files names all intact. So OSX seems to have no problem with them. But when i import them, the TC all starts at 00;00 and they have no reel names.

MORAL OF STORY: Stay way way away from clip names more than 21 characters. The MM itself may add up to 3 or 4 characters to the end of subclip names, so 21 characters is about the limit.

Limiting characters to under 25 is not a new thing, it just seems like MM should fail gracefully, rather than miserably. It should NEVER reach into my existing project and change my clip names, that's for sure.

[docs.info.apple.com]

--ralph

Me thinks wwe should just stay away from MM entirely until FCP 4.02!

For complex projects you might have to stay away until 6 or 7.

All the best,

Tom

Well, it's here..... I dunno Mitch, I don'thave a good feeling about this MM thing. I think Tom has the right idea. Let's revisit the MM when v7 comes out!

Dang, after 3 years, sure seems like we could get an MM that works.

--Ralph

Listen guys, this is getting disproportionately dismal.

I've had a great time with Media Manager-- in one test it even reached into a NEST and properly trimmed the clips inside it. I was blown away by that. Anybody tested that?

I do keep my clip names short, and I do not edit on a Powerbook.

This is a *great* forum, by the by. Keep up the good work, I check out everything I read here to see what arcane stuff I've missed.

- Loren
Today's FCP4 keytip:
To resize all video or audio tracks:
press Option and drag any divider!

FCP4 KeyGuide? now available at
www.neotrondesign.com

Okay Loren,

But this is a forum dedicated to *reporting bugs*

That's the sole purpose here.

--Ralph

I did have a surprisingly positive experience reaching into 3 layers deep of a nest and getting accurate TC's. BUT, there are serious issues with other parts of MM. We've got workarounds, but it'd be MUCH better if there were no need for them. If I can assist in getting any of this cleared up, well, that's why I'm killing part of my last weekend of freedom typing into a web forum...

Could you say what serious issues you're having with MM?

All the best,

Tom

[www.lafcpug.org]

As Ralph pointed out elsewhere, this is technically behavior, not bug, because its in the manual. But I just can't for the life of me see it as behavior. The article for my workaround to it is on Ken's website.

[www.kenstone.net]

The other method of "Make Sequence Clips Independent", even on a duplicate sequence in the same project makes me a little nervous, so I drag and drop-orphan to another project.

The other MM issues is all the stuff encountered here so far, particularly with the naming stuff Ralph is dredging up...