media management madness nightmare
 

Ok, I realize this is something I did, my own fault, nonetheless, it sucks and I wonder if anyone has any advice.

So I'm working on an FCP project (v6 if it matters). Every once in a while, I'll leave the computer, or at least stop working in FCP, though it remains open, and come back to find almost everything, media-wise, is "missing", and I have to do a reconnect media for all these items.

I believe this started when I opened a backup (time machine that is) copy of the project off my backup drive, when I realized I'd done something stupid like rippled the entire timeline 20 seconds after a certain point and couldn't "undo" my way back to rightness. I know FCP save a backup file locally every so often, but at the time that didn't occur to me.

So at first it was fine, then things started getting screwy, because the files in the project are mostly saved locally, since they're audio files and I didn't think it'd be a big deal to have them on my mac HD instead of a separate drive. So, I'm working off a backup copy of the project from another drive, and FCP thinks all the media in that project is saved on on the backup of my whole mac HD on that backup drive, instead of my REAL mac HD, where it really is.

I guess as time machine backs up automatically it overwrites the backups, and so the media FCP is referring back to suddenly disappears at some point.

I've done the reconnect thing before, and told it to use the media on my real mac HD, so everything seems like it should be stable, yet now, every couple days, if not every day, everything will offline at some point.

Is there any way to get everything straight? Without of course starting the project over or reinstalling FCP or anything like that?

Doesn't sound right. Where is your Time Machine back up file going? I hope to an external drive with at least same size as your main HD. Time Machine does not overwrite anything until the backup drive is full.

Once you reconnect the media you should do a "save as" for the project file and work from that from then on. If the files keep disappearing, you have a big problem with your directory file on your main drive.

It's a 1 TB external drive.

Hey Josh,

Since you wrote this in a post a few days ago...

- "Are these the '08 imacs? I have one, and every time I tried to mess with HD, it pretty much grinds to a halt. Even moving the playhead around causes the colored beach ball to come up. I've dropped EX1 footage in the timeline as well as dealing with an animated project using 1080 QT movies, and reference movies with image sequences. What am I doing wrong? Sequence settings match footage, etc."

It sounds like you may have to clean things up a bit. Do you have ONYX (free & can sometimes spot a problem in the drive) or Disc Warrior to diagnose it?

I think I have the free disc warrior that came with it (as opposed to the kind that cleans from an external drive), but I'm loathe to mess with anything like that 'til this project's done.

I know what you mean, I loathe to mess with that kinda stuff even when I'm not deep in a project.

OnyX is free & when you open it it will scan your disc & say "your disc seems to be okay", You wouldn't even have to use any of the utilities, If that showed a problem, at least you'd know there was something wrong. Robert pointed me in this direction a while back when I was having problems with my G5, OnyX said there was a problem with the disc, I got disc warrior & ran it and it took care of the problem. Of course I had a full backup, so if anything went wrong I could just put the clone in the PM.

Dealing with an imac I personally would be more cautious.

I neglected to mention that in the past few days I've done the process I described above, going back to a backup copy of the project from time machine, more than once. . .which is probably not helping the issue. Let's see if everything stays "sane" for a couple of days if I can avoid making a dumb mistake that causes me to go back to time machine copies. I changed the prefs so it saves a backup copy every 5 minutes instead of every 30, so if I screw something up irreparably, I can use one of those.

Free DiscWarrior? Haven't come across that before but it would only work on external drives in that configuration anyway. The fact is that you have a backup so you can retrieve your important files (project files, media, etc.) if there's a massive problem with the main drive. Run Onyx, use Apple's Disc Utility on the system DVD that came with your computer if Onyx detects a problem. It's not as thorough as DiscWarrior but it can fix some problems.

Sorry, my mistake. Someone told me techtool and disc warrior together were the way to defrag your system, and there is a free techtool app on the imac. I just got 'em mixed up.

A thought I have is it sounds like your drive is kicking off and going to sleep possibly? Can you make sure its set to stay on all the time in power management? I had that issue with mine at one point and it fixed it.

which drive do you mean, the mac HD or the external? The external definitely "hibernates" if not actively used for a few minutes.

It's the power saving in preferences, just uncheck the put HD asleep when possible, but this should only be an issue when you leave the comp idle for short periods of time. It is something you should definitely do, but it shouldn't be an issue if you are actively working, only if you leave your comp for a few minutes or even if you got to another program that is not using the external & then switch back to FC.

The problem I've had with this is that when the "put HD asleep when possible" is check & I leave the comp for a while, when I go back to FC, the spinning pinwheel comes up & then FC quits. Never really an issue when I'm just continually editing, since the HD are not typically put to sleep.

Since all my drives are internal, I'm not sure if this setting applies to externals, though I imagine it does.

UNLESS its a WD consumer MyBook, in which case you're screwed - no way to disable the onboard "spindown".