Media went offline in FCP 5.1.4
 

I have been editing an hour long presentation done by a professor at a conference. I am using FCP 5.1.4 and shooting SD from a GL1 and an XL1s. I raced back and forth between the cameras during the shoot, praying I would have enough overlap between them to cover any problems that might arise in editing. I think I covered it pretty well.
There was also a slide show he was presenting and that needed to be captured as well. Anyway, all the media was placed on an external Maxtor 250Gig HD. I get about 10 minutes edited per 4-5 hour editing session after my day job is done.

This conference actually had 12 speakers and I videoed all 12 and will be producing a DVD set containing all of them. This is the second time I have covered a conference like this. Hopefully this time I will more than break even. I sold the last DVD set for $80, it contained 9.5 hours of video.

I had a problem three days ago that many others might also come across sometime, if they haven’t already. With FCP open and my project ready to edit I inadvertently disconnected the Maxtor HD containing my projects media. Ooooops… big ooooops really.

I read everything I could on how to reconnect the media but nothing worked for two days. Made it all Offline in my browser and timeline and tried to reconnect Online… nothing worked. Finally I decided to try something… I opened one of the still slides extracted from the speakers PowerPoint show in Photoshop and resaved it, overwriting the original and keeping the same name, size and resolution… nothing was changed. Went back to FCP, never even closed it down, did the Offline – Online reconnect thing and presto the still reappeared as connected. I had to do this with about 20 slides that had some serious (for me) editing done to them to make them interesting enough to stare at while listening to the speaker.

Next I had some 13 minute DV clips from a Firestore HD and one from a tape (two cameras remember). I copied these files to a different location, deleted them from the original location on my Maxtor and then copied them back… took awhile since each was about 1.2 gig in size but once again this fixed the problem. All the media was reconnected now.

I did have to do a full render of both video, stills and audio afterwards… about 3 hours of rendering for the 1 hr show.

G5, 8gig Ram, 512mb video FCPs
G4, 4gig Ram laptop FCPe

This is good information. You could have saved yourself a lot of time, if you knew about a Un*x command line program called "touch". All you'd have to do is navigate to the parent folder of your project files and use touch to update the last modified timestamp on all of them, in the blink of an eye.