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Filed under: Editing •Post Production •Software •Tips •

Final Cut Pro’s achilles heel or how I hate the reconnection dance

When you talk about media management in Final Cut Pro it’s often not a big issue to many as you digitize a few tapes or import some P2 media, add graphics, music and you’re done. FCP’s bad media management never rears its ugly head. But when you start working with many different clips across a lot of hard drives then the frustration can grow. And let’s not even talk about multiple editors working on the same job in different locations. Say you are cutting for a director that has an exact copy of your media on his computer and all he wants to do is open the project file, watch the edit, make notes and then send it back… you must both go through the reconnection dance each time you open the modified project. It’s a pain and a waste of time.

The reconnection dance is a step that an editor really shouldn’t have to go through when they are opening an edit where the location of the media hasn’t change since the last time the project was open. If you are working on a job with another editor in a different location or an editor using the same media on different drives then the reconnection dance will be familiar to you. Let’s think about why this happens. Final Cut Pro looks to a specific path for the location of media:

In this example it’s looking for the drive Hawking > folder Robinson Racing > subfolder Robinson racing in car cam and then other specific subfolders for the media. If I was to give another editor an exact copy of the media for this project then the folder structure would remain mostly the same except for the top level name of the hard drive. In this case Hawking would be replaced with a different drive name and possibly one more subfolder. So when the other editor went to open this project for the first time they would be confronted with the reconnection warning:

That’s not totally unwarranted since FCP doesn’t use any kind of central database to track its files. Since the path where it found the media on longer exists you have to point FCP to the location of the media files for it to be able to reconnect them. It doesn’t have to be a completely manual process as FCP can scan your drive to look for clips that have the same file name:

This helps somewhat but if you have a lot of files scattered over a lot of drives then it can be a pain. Clicking the Search button will scan all the drives and can take time with lots of large drives attached. The Locate button will give you a dialog box to manually find the clip. While FCP will automatically find other files in the same directory that it needs you still have to point it to the first clip it is asking for. Again it can be a long process with many clips on different hard drives. It’s understandable to have to do this once when opening a project for the first time but if you are handing edits off to another editor on a regular basis then this process of always having to reconnect the media gets old … fast. There needs to be a better way.

Avid has always been known for its rock solid media management. Once a piece of media is in the Avid it always knows where that media is, come hell or high water. When passing off an edit to another editor he/she only needs to rebuild the Avid database once and then Avid will always know where all the media for that edit is located. It does this by building a dedicated media database for all of its media drives:

But one thing the Avid has to do that FCP does not is to copy any imported media into its Avid MediaFiles folder (it’s called the OMFI Media folder on omf based Avids). [NOTE: This article was originally written before Avid introduced the Avid Media Access architecture.] By doing this it has to create new media in the supported Avid format in that folder. This could be seen as a disadvantage if you had lots of music or a tons of graphics already taking up space on a hard drive. It all depends on perspective I guess as the advantage of Avid’s great media management means you have to use more drive space on occasion. An Avid edit is an amazingly organized thing with the Avid project file usually on the system drive and all media on a few media drives in the Avid MediaFiles folder. Often a Final Cut Pro edit is an incredibly messy pile-of-dung with media, graphics and music scattered from the user’s iTunes folder to the desktop to one firewire drive after another. Try to collect that to send to another editor and you usually forget something. If I had a dime for every FCP project that I’ve opened over the years with missing media from the previous desktop or user’s iTunes folder I’d hire software engineers to write my own personal NLE application! But this totally depends on the organization of the editor to begin with. An organized edit shouldn’t have media scattered here to there as the editor knows what they are doing and how to properly organize and track their media. This goes back to the debate of the younger FCP editor who hasn’t learned proper media management skills. But that’s another debate that has already been debated.

What Final Cut Pro needs is its own database tracking ability to keep track of all imported/captured/digitized media. The best of both worlds between FCP’s easy access of drag-and-drop, no-wait importing and Avid’s database than can recognize when you are opening a previously opened project where the media is on the edit system.

If you think about it, non-linear editing applications are themselves just database managers (at their most basic level) as they look to media on hard drives and play it back in a specifically arranged order that the editor has instructed from the timeline. FCP needs to take this one step further. If it could build a project specific database for each piece of media imported, captured or dragged into the browser and then compare that with its associated project each time it is opened then, at least in theory, that could save the reconnect dance when opening a project that had been changed by another editor. This seems especially do-able when the name of the project hasn’t changed. Since FCP projects can often balloon in size what you might find yourself doing is creating a new project with only one edit sequence. This obviously wouldn’t match the name of the original project so in that case I could see FCP allowing the user to point to a specific database to be associated with that project. While the project name has changed the media file names and attributes of the clips in the edit would not have changed so pointing that project to the proper database could make reconnection automatic.

Next Page: Loader as a media management alternative and it’s still happening today

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I hate this kind of things… I use Pro Tools a lot and it have almost the same problems.

Posted by Gonzalo_TC  on  02/25  at  12:10 PM

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An Avid house here… one of my clients is trying to use FCP for callouts and rough cuts.  They called regarding their reconnect headaches - had to admit I couldn’t help much…

Posted by Bill Nelson  on  03/03  at  02:34 PM

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Your article is a key example of the lack of effort Apple is putting in to Pro apps. 7 versions in and FCP is still lacking decent media management.

For comparison, when you digitize in iMovie, oh, let’s take iMovie version 1.0 for example, iMovie captures and collects all a project’s media into a project “package” that lets you drag EVERYTHING associated with that one project to an external drive for backup- with one click.

You touch on this when you mention Loader: “Loader allows the editor to drag media into the Loader interface and then Loader will copy (and in certain instances convert) the media to a designated media folder for that particular project, be it graphics, audio, etc.”

FCP has never had the ability to properly track when a user jumps between projects, and automatically ensure that newly captured / transferred footage ends up in the proper project folder. FCP just sucks at this.

I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting all my captured/rendered/ etc files to exist in a project folder for a particular client, not in subfolders under the Capture, Render, etc folders that reside at the root level of a drive. This is just another example of FCP’s “pile of dung” organization scheme on the hard drive.

FCP should see that I’m now in Project B and Project B’s scratch folder was folder B. Then when I go back to Project A, it knows to put timeline renders into Folder A. It should know. But has never been programmed to.

iMovie had this perfect organization from version 1.0. (It could also record voice-over directly into the timeline form version 1.0, but I digress).

It’s high time Apple give their Pro apps some user-requested feature & TLC, but with all their attention on iPhone, iPad, iTouch, iBookstore, iApps, & iTunes sales, I know there’s no point in waiting because it’s just not going to happen.

Posted by IEBA  on  03/04  at  01:50 PM

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I think it would also help if FCP forced unique file names like Avid does while making its own contained scratch folder. I’m sure more third party software will come out that will help/solve a lot of these issues. I also find that FCP can be buggy, and just lose media connection on its own and won’t want to reconnect.

I had an audio file just go offline for absolutely now reason earlier this week. The song was in the primary projects folder, all my scratch disks were set right, been editing it for 2+ weeks, and no issues, and then it just went offline one day when I opened it up. I tried to reconnect and it wouldn’t let me! The “connect” button was greyed out permanently. I had to convert the file to a different format, and just replace the track all together. There was no way of reconnecting to it.

Maybe media management protocols in the software are way beyond what I know, but something as simple as keeping track of a single song track in the projects folder isn’t a lot to ask for…

Posted by Thomas Wong  on  03/06  at  08:26 AM

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Hello

When we archive a final project, we transfer the project files, media, renders, etc. to multiple external hard drives (one for the client and one or two for us depending on the job)

Sometimes we need to make revisions to these archived projects and then I am forced to reconnect the files in FCP.

In Color however we are not always able to reconnect the files. In a lynda.com training video the instructor creates a disk image for the projects/renders because, “when files are moved out of this absolute path, media files become offline and Final Cut Pro roundtrips do not work as intended” (from the How To Use Exercise Files.rtf in the Ex_Files_Color15_Ess.zip.)

Would it be possible to use a similar convention of saving Final Cut Studio projects/media to a disk image on our RAID to be able to update archive projects more efficiently?

If we ran out of space on that disk image could we create a larger one with the same name and copy that info to it?

any help you could give would be great.

Best,

Richard

Posted by sevencircuit  on  04/15  at  07:50 AM

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