succesful 'relinking' of copied media, the hard way

Situation: your events and projects are stored on disk A and you want to move/copy to another (external) drive B. Doing this the official way (via the options in the fcpx menus) crashed my application. So i had to find another way.

I simply copied the 2 folders for event X and project Y from drive A to B in the finder and started FCPX. (project Y uses the media from event X).

The two drives showed up in the event library and the project library, but for drive B the event library only showed folder X in which the media was stored, but not the media in that folder. The timeline for project Y showed media offline even if the media is physically present on the new location (drive B). So you need to relink the media to your timeline (storyline, projects, whatever they wanna call it).

Quit fcpx and unmount drive A if possible. This is optional, but helps to keep an overview when 'relinking' and to be sure every thing shows up as expected.

Start fcpx and select the event folder X (in the event library).
Now right-click and choose 'import files' . Choose the files that are already in the event X folder on drive B. Choose the option 'Copy Files to Final Cut Events Folder' on drive B.
fcpx will only rebuild it's database so no media will be copied since it's already in the events folder (you copied it from drive A tot B).
All your media will show up in the event library and your timeline will be restored with all media present.

If fcpx tells you there is not enough space to complete the operation, simply import less files at a time. fcpx thinks it needs to copy everything so it reserves space on the drive (but in fact doesn't need to copy anuthing, it just needs to rebuild it's library).

This seems for me at this time the only way to succesfully move/copy projects with relinked media to an external drive for 'editing on the road'.


Hope this helps

[s]

hi Tony

i had crashes with both the 'move' and 'duplicate' menu commands.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that i imported a lot of media from my original fcp7 scratch location without copying the files to the event folder fcpx likes. Seems like fcpx had some troubles with the aliasses it created.

After replacing the aliasses with the media and using the above mentioned method all seems to work fine. I tried it again with a second external drive and my media was back online in a couple of minutes (after a couple of hours copying via finder). It went so smooth i even forgot to try the built-in option to duplicate the project and it's events.

[s]