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Editing Tips and Tricks

Media Offline!

Thursday, 06 November 2008

Oh noooooo!!! All my clips are offline!! What? Why? How? Oh ya, this is going to happen to you, especially if you use external hard drives, share computers, reorganize, move clips.....edit. There seem to be countless ways of severing the connections of your media. One thing I have noticed, is that most beginning editors figure out how to reconnect media before ever understanding how or why it got unconnected. Perhaps I can explain.

When you first open your project Final Cut will immediatley inform you if you have media offline. Of course you can't work on your film if you don't have you media online. What you must do is tell FCP where the files have moved to or ask it to search for them, this usually works and you can move on, but how do you prevent it from happening over and over? The case for the missing media begins in our bin browser. You might notice your timeline has things missing in there too, but don't bother with it, the browser holds the answers.

What Final Cut shows in the browser is a reference to the actual clip on your computer or external heard drive whether its an .AVI, .MOV, .MP4 ect. Just because they are all organized in your bins, does not mean they are all organized on your computer. To see the reality of this, right click, control click any ONLINE clip in your browser. The 4th option down is REVEAL IN FINDER. This will do exactly that and you can see where FCP is pulling the media from. If you imported everything from a camera then it will be found in the capture scratch folder, if you imported a file from elsewhere, then it needs to remain there forever or as long as FCP needs to see it.

Seeing how this all connects on the backend will help you stay organized in the future when you are moving and importing files around your computer or external hard drive. Knowing how FCP remembers where your imported clips should be is the best way to prevent getting your clips unconnected. if your nice to the FCP, it's nice to you.