Cs5 is asking me to find all media associated with a project file imported from FCP BY HAND.

Question

Please tell me there is a way around this.
I have an XML file that was exported from FCP and I'm importing it  into CS5. I have the drive with all of the media on it. I load up the XML and CS5 is asking me to find every single piece of media involved with the project by hand on the drive. THis is insane and will take me hours. Why will it not locate it itself? Please someone tell me there's a way to let it search throught he folders on its own.

Answer 1

Repeating some of what has been stated here....
What PPro is looking for is the assets in the same directory structure as when the XML file was created from FCP. So let's say that as you were about to save the XML file from FCP, you had all the assets on 1 single drive. Some were in Folder A, some where in Folder B, some in Folder A-1 (a subfolder of A) and some in Folder B-1 (subfolder of B). As long as the files remained in roughly that same folder structure in relation to one another, PPro should be able to find all the other assets AFTER you've found the first one.
With all the translation if you go from a Mac to a PC system, there's a lot of chance there that the directory structure - even if you kept it basically all intact - could still be messed up. Once the XML is loaded into PPro, however, you should be able to select multiple offline clips in the project folder, choose "Link Media" and have PPro go through and (hopefully) find everything automagically. If not, the Finder button in the "Link Media" dialog box should help.
PPro doesn't really care specifically about folders and subfolders when relinking, it is just looking for the RELATIONAL structure based on the last time the assets were ONLINE in the project. So even if your original assets were in 1,400 different folders, it shouldn't require you to relink based on each individual folder, so long as the RELATIONSHIP between all the files and folders remained the same.
Hopefully that makes sense. I know when I work with FCP editors the footage is generally handed to me on a drive with all the assets being essentially in a very different relationship than when they were on their FCP projects (since they usually are going from multiple drives on their Mac to the single drive that they hand me with the project assets). So I'm usually required to manually relink all the assets anyway. Kind of a bummer, but thankfully most projects are limited to only about 100 assets or so, and filenames are generally unique.
Good luck!