Saving the Day---Final Cut Pro’s “Reconnect Media” feature
Two of my video projects are videos of weddings (mine and a relative on my wife’s side) and the other is what will become a training film. They are all loaded into Final Cut Pro HD. With some trepidation, I decided to move the projects from the 4 hard disk dual G4 PowerMac to the two hard disk G5 I had just bought. I knew if I was unsuccessful, I would either have to finish the projects on the G4 or reload all the footage onto the G5. The latter would take a week of evenings.
Before making the attempt, I pulled out my Final Cut Pro User Guide and looked up the “Reconnect Media” feature. According to the manual, when you dump video in Final Cut Pro, it establishes a link between the browser window containing the list of your clips and the actual files. The “Reconnect Media” feature was supposed to allow you to re-link to your media if you moved the files to another location. If that worked as advertised, I could move the files from my G4 to the data hard disk (the second one) on my G5 and get full functionality back by simply telling FCP where the files were. To test that without destroying my ability to edit if it didn’t work, I copied the files from three G4 hard drives on to the G5 using external Firewire hard disks as “go betweens”. Copying to Firewire disks not only provided faster movement than going across my network but gave me backups so I only had to disturb the original files once.
Once I got all the media files moved to the G5, I launched Final Cut Pro and opened the associated projects one at a time. In each case, FCP gave me a window listing the clips with broken links and a chance to reconnect the media to them. When I told it wanted to, the program presented a dialog similar to an “Open File” dialog; and I simply directed it to the folder where the files were. Only the name for the file I was looking for was highlighted in the folder; the others were “greyed out”. While I had to step through the process for each clip with a broken link, locating all the files in one folder on the G5 made it relatively fast and painless. In a few minutes, I was ready to edit---now on the G5!
Before making the attempt, I pulled out my Final Cut Pro User Guide and looked up the “Reconnect Media” feature. According to the manual, when you dump video in Final Cut Pro, it establishes a link between the browser window containing the list of your clips and the actual files. The “Reconnect Media” feature was supposed to allow you to re-link to your media if you moved the files to another location. If that worked as advertised, I could move the files from my G4 to the data hard disk (the second one) on my G5 and get full functionality back by simply telling FCP where the files were. To test that without destroying my ability to edit if it didn’t work, I copied the files from three G4 hard drives on to the G5 using external Firewire hard disks as “go betweens”. Copying to Firewire disks not only provided faster movement than going across my network but gave me backups so I only had to disturb the original files once.
Once I got all the media files moved to the G5, I launched Final Cut Pro and opened the associated projects one at a time. In each case, FCP gave me a window listing the clips with broken links and a chance to reconnect the media to them. When I told it wanted to, the program presented a dialog similar to an “Open File” dialog; and I simply directed it to the folder where the files were. Only the name for the file I was looking for was highlighted in the folder; the others were “greyed out”. While I had to step through the process for each clip with a broken link, locating all the files in one folder on the G5 made it relatively fast and painless. In a few minutes, I was ready to edit---now on the G5!
posted by Andy Foster at
3:17 PM
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