Well, this isn’t new…happens a lot. Reconnecting issues where you don’t see the title of the clip, but rather just the name of the computer’s hard drive, and nothing else. This is driving me nuts.

An editor here had a majority of the photos and animations used in his project stored on his local drive. So when he opened the project, he could see everything just fine. But when I went to assemble the show, I had 118 missing media files. He moved the files to the SAN on the Finder level, but now we needed to get the project to reference those file, and not the ones on his computer. So we trashed the ones on the computer and then opened the project, with the intent of reconnecting to the ones on the SAN when we were prompted with the MISSING MEDIA FILES warning.

Most of them went fine…reconnected without issue. But then we got this:


(click on the images to see the high res versions)

It showed the name of the hard drive…but that’s it. No name for the media…it was blank. We clicked on SEARCH and the machine beeped at us. So we had to hit LOCATE…and find the file. But then when we found it, FCP would not automatically highlight it…because it didn’t associate a name with the file…for some odd reason.

So I had to turn off MATCH NAME AND REEL ONLY…and connect the files one at a time. Ugh…

This was a royal pain…44 images and media files to reconnect manually.

Now this all could have been avoided if I used the Media Manager. I have been very skittish of using it, due to the wild inconsistencies I’d get from it in FCP 3 to FCP 5. But it has really improved. We tested it on another project from the same editor…again, stills and media on his system drive. We found them in the Browser and then used the Media Manager to MOVE them onto the SAN into a folder we specified. That worked beautifully.

The Media Manager is improving. I just did a “consolidate” of all the footage used in a cut, with 1 second handles. Testing how long it will take…because this is what we will be giving to our colorist. The 45 min show took 30 min. Not bad, I was expecting hours. Only a few glitches here and there…and not related to speed changes, but to media that was 59.94 fps in a 23.98 project. They came over as freeze frames, and all I had to do was match back to the media and re-cut it in.