Using Media Manager to Decompose offline clips only (Like Avid)

OK... Here's the scenario. I have a Timeline sequence lasting 10 mins. This timeline has been edited direclty from 20 x 1 hour clips from 20 x 1 hour tapes with timecode. I have stored the media on 2 external FW800 drives but one of the drives has failed leaving me with a timeline with half of the clips missing iy's media. The edit is at a pretty final stage and we need to re-dig the media but want to only re-dig that which is missing.
Using Media manager or any other software element is there a way of batch capturing only the short offline (decomposed) clips from the timeline without re-digising the whole of the 10 hours which is missing from the drives. Also., to make things more complicated, this has to be done automatically i.e. without re-editing the clips from the browser back into the timeline.
I would be most grateful for any help on this matter as this is the only thing that seperates Avid Media Composer from FCP as a proper media manager tool.
Thanks!!!

haven't tried this but it may be worth some investigation.
try exporting an XML of your sequence and passing that to the director
on the director's FCP setup, import the xml, and in the Import XML... window uncheck the "Override with setting from XML" checkbox, and choose the approriate offline res that matches the directors media.
see if the resulting sequence will reconnect

Similar Messages

Using Media Manager to 'Make Offline' it re-names media files to 'Private'

For some reason Media Manager is changing the name of media files when processing them making it impossible to reconnect them.
My director always has a complete copy of our film's media files on his 'home set-up' (FCP 5.0 on a Powerbook with 2 x 500gb firewire drives) so he can look at our cuts at home. This has caused problems in the past with firewire drives expiring or failing to mount: making the whole process pointless. Also, as the amount of footage increased, he struggled to find space for the 6-8 drives required.
My solution was to down-convert our DV resolution media files to Photo-Jpeg resolution which allowed me to fit 3TB of footage onto 2 brand new G-Tech drives. Every time I sent him a cut to view all I had to do was use media manager to make the sequence offline and convert it to exactly the same Photo-Jpeg setting I used to export the files. All he has to do is reconnect the sequence to his drives at his end.
A wonderful plan except when you came to reconnecting. I found that 95% of clips connect perfectly and then you get asked for the location of some media files called 'Trashes' 'Applications' or more commonly, 'Private'. Obviously no such files existed - I use an impeccably organised and structured filename system when capturing. Therefore it made random clips in my sequence impossible to reconnect once it had been converted to the settings used by the director.
When this only happened once or twice I thought I could easily just work out what files it was actually looking for by the clip names on the timeline and tell FCP to reconnect to the correct file by ignoring the file name but this is so time consuming and impractical when you have 20/30 clips that have been renamed on a sequence. It is also not the sort of thing my director is technically capable/willing to do.
It also seems to be happening when you convert things in the other direction. When I took a sequence from the director's project and brought it back onto my system by converting his sequence to my DV-PAL settings we got the same problems with 'Private and 'Applications' clips. And we know for sure that all of these clips were online on his computer.
Has anyone seen this before or know any steps I could take to prevent it happening.
I fear that if I can't get this method to work I will have to give him full resolution media to work with and I will be fated to spend the rest of my days replacing. smashing or swearing at firewire drives that only work when they feel like it.
Anybody got any ideas.
Cheers
Paul
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

haven't tried this but it may be worth some investigation.
try exporting an XML of your sequence and passing that to the director
on the director's FCP setup, import the xml, and in the Import XML... window uncheck the "Override with setting from XML" checkbox, and choose the approriate offline res that matches the directors media.
see if the resulting sequence will reconnect

Cant locate offline clips after deleting unused media using Media Manager

Hi,
I recently used Media Manager for the first time to clean up an old project of mine, and delete unused media to save some space. Having read and re-read all manuals/help I proceeded with the 'Use Existing' command in the Media Manager...and now a big portion of my files are offline.
There was no option to 'save to a location' but when I go to 'reconnect media' the pathway for these offline files is -
Macintosh HD:private:var:tmp:folders.501:TemporaryItems
and the clips are labelled with '-2' or '-3' after their name.
Ive used spotlight and searched through my HD and lacie - and I cant find the location above at all! Im getting worried, as i need to go back into the project to make some really minor changes but cant face re-capturing material then eye-matching the shots ive used, it will take days! These clips must be floating around somewhere on the system?
Please please help! Thank you!!

Thanks Chris - I can go back to my source material although dont know if I can batch capture ok as the source material was captured in an old version of FC Express and had been moved over to my new FCP 4 - dont know if this might cause problems...i hope not!
Regarding the backup of source material - just wondering if theres any other way to make those files smaller - it seems a waste of valuable storage space if Ive captured say an hours worth of footage but only ended up using 20 mins of it in my end sequence (for example). Is there no way to get rid of that extra 40 mins of media that ill never use again?

Quits unexpectedly after using Media Manager / Reconnecting clips

Im having trouble with my project file. I used media manager to seperate all my subclips into independant clips. When it got to 18% it kept telling me that there was a code 12 on a few of the clips and it can't process them, Then it quits. Im sure that it's mucked up some of the clips in the capture scratch. I then opened it again, and it would not open properly, it opened up showe dthe splash screen then closed again inexplicably. All my footage is on my external Lacie, a big one and I transferred it to a small one to see if that would help. It does the same thing and I could not open my project file. I checked with other files, it was def only this one. So I unplugged my external drive and reset capture scratch to the computer HD. It opened fine, but obviously I had to connect my files again. When I did that though the programme crashed again. I have no idea what to do, is it a render file, is it a corrupt file in the capture scratch which Final Cit Pro made out of good files that I had, which is really irritating. I can't continue with my project. I don't understand why it keeps quitting on me. I tried reparing the disc permissions etc. Nothing has worked so far. Any help would be great please!!!

Maybe some of your clips are corrupt. Divide and conquer might be the best approach.
I don't know how much editing you've done, but you could drag some of your clips into a new project and reconnect them, save, then add some more, etc.
WARNING: if you don't have Final Cut 6, then you will find that the linkage between sequences and clips will be broken if you do this. In other words, if you match-frame from a sequence, it won't find the master clip in your bin. Bad news.
So, if you've got some sequences cut, and you're running FCP 5.1 or before, consider moving the sequences to a new project (this will copy them, the old ones will remain) and "Create New Master Clips." Re-link those and add your other material.
You could also re-import material from your media drive, in batches.
If some of your clips are corrupt, you might have to recapture them. "Tools ->Analyze Movie" may be helpful in rooting out bad master clips.
Good luck.

Using Media Manager to condense project

Hi All,
So I'm working on a doc that has about 5+ TB of footage stored on a server. The director is travelling out of country for a little while, and wants to get everything that's being used onto his 1 TB drive, so that he can edit/make adjustments while he's out of town. I've been told using media manager is the way to do this, however I've only tried using it once, and it totally didn't do what I hoped, so I wanted to know if anyone has any tips for this sort of thing. Before anyone asks, Yes I read the manual and it didn't make my first attempt at MM work any smoother.
Basically, I need to create smaller .mov files from the larger files the clips are referenced from, without losing the original larger files, then take the new small ones and put them on a drive so they can travel. Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks
Austin

I don't know why the link isn't working now.
You can subscribe/download from MacBreak Studios podcast through iTunes. They have many great videos. Take a look at them.

Using Media Manager to Cut up Long Media Files

After reading the chapters in the manually quite thouroughly, I still can't make Media Manager to do what I want it to. I need several long media files broken into smaller files, for use in soundtrack pro.
I captured 17 Tapes worth of footage from start to stop, and then logged them and turned individual shots and taks into subclips. After importing each subclip into SoundTack Pro, I realized that it will import the entire original media, and not just the sub clip, thus I decided that I needed to break up all my actual media files, into smaller files. (If there's a way around this, seeing as how working in SoundTrack with an individual Takes audio is my goal, I'd love to hear about it)
So, I tried to use media manager. I set it up with "use existing" media selected, "Delete unsed media from selected clips" selected, "base media files on" set to clip names, and did NOT select duplicate selected clips and place into a new project. I did NOT use handles.
After it was done processing, it did not break the files into individual takes (the way the subclips were made) like I wanted it to. It did break the files down smaller, but it includes multiple takes and multiple shots in each file.
Can someone please point me in the right direction as to what I need to do? Or, if someone can show me a work around for the using subclips in SoundTrack pro (I know this is not the SoundTrack pro Forum) then I would do fine using the clips how they are.
Thanks for your time.

You really need to go to the Final Cut PRO forum.

Can't drag any files to blackberry from computer using media manager

Just got my Blackberry Curve out of the box today and got it all set up. I am now trying to drag some files over using Media Manager on the desktop manager. I have my blackberry connected to the computer. I open Media manager and see My computer options on the left and my blackberry connected on the right. I located my file in my computer side. Highlight it and try to drag it into the blackberry memory, but it won't let me. I also can't use the arrow buttons to transfer it. They don't "light up." They just stay gray. Did I miss something in installation? I have tried MP3's, word docs, excel docs, etc. It is not taking anything...
Message Edited by krisfisch06 on 10-23-2008 04:02 PM

I have found that installing the OS for your device alleviates this problem, but if you have a microSD card in your BlackBerry it is easier to just open up the My Computer icon and just drag and drop into the appropriate folders.

I want to use media manager to make a copy of a sequence

I want to only copy the media in s 1 minute sequence and create a new project in media manager. It seems to only want to do the entire project. Goes from 350 gigs to 350 gigs. What am I doing wrong?

Actually Shane, I'm not sure that's always true. I've done a bunch of media manages within the last year where things such as audio files didn't have reels associated with them and everything seemed to work ok.
I'll do a quick test and see what happens.
That said, you ALWAYS need to test the integrity of your media manage BEFORE deleting any files or starting on any mission criticial process.

Using Media Manager to convert movies to apple pro res

Using Media Manager to convert movies to apple pro res, How can I convert my existing media files from quicktime movies into apple pro res 422 ?
After they are converted will I have to re-point my fcp project to the converted files?
Thank You for taking time to answer these
Carl

Sorry, I am not following.
You said you have converted them to prores LT & are having this issue, or is it with H264 files in your edit?
How did you convert? using media manager, or compressor?
if you still are using the H264 media that would be the issue.
That is not an editing codec. it is a delivery codec.
The thing to have done would have been to convert to prores before you started editing.
or did you do that?

Help! Do I need to use Media Manager to re-encode my AVI's so that the image is not so terrible?

I hired someone to take 16mm film and digitize it for me. He gave me AVI files, though I asked for MOV files. When I brought the AVI files into FCP, it said "use media manager to optimize this footage for FCP use." I (foolishly) didn't because I haven't had great success with Media Manager before, and the assets looked fine in FCP despite the warning. In truth, I am kindof intimidated by Media Manager... it's just not something I have ever had the opportunity to learn until now.
I have now edited the footage, exported from FCP in Quicktime MOV, imported into DVD Studio Pro, and burned a disk. PROBLEM: The image quality is terrible. I know it must have something to do with the warning I ignored. So now I'm looking at Media Manager and wondering how to proceed. I'm sure the warning told me what to do, but now that I can't see it again, I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with Media Manager... re-encode? After seeing poor quality images, re-encoding doesn't feel right... but maybe?
It's also possible that the problem isn't with the AVI's at all, but somewhere else. The DVD quality is poorer than the video playback in FCP, so somewhere along the line there was decay, and I'm assuming it was when FCP exported. I'm kindof freaking out. Any help would be great.
Also, my Compressor doesn't work anymore, so I'm screwed for using that.
Thanks,
RH

Much like the ubiquitous "QuickTime Movie" (.mov) file type, the AVI file type is merely a container. The audio and video streams within that container could be made from a number of different codecs.
Most AVI codecs don't work in FCP natively, which means you will have to render more often than if you had converted the footage first to a FCP friendly codec.
If the video looked good in FCP, but bad on a finished DVD, chances are the quality loss was during the encoding process. I assume you used DVD Studio Pro for encoding, since you say that Compressor doesn't work for you. I'd look into getting that problem solved and then use Compressor to handle the encoding and just use DVD Studio Pro for authoring and burning.
Have you tried this?: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/compressorrepair/
-DH

When I use media manager to upres clip audio goes out of sync

I captured a clip and put it in DVNTSC 48kHz timeline at OfflineRT NTSC (Photo JPEG) then used the media manager to create a new sequence at full DV NTSC 48kHz res. I choose "Create offline", "set sequences to DV NTSC 48 kHz", and check all the boxes. I save a new project, open the new timeline and recapture the clip. The video looks great--it recaptures in full DVNTSC 48kHz res. But the audio is out of sync (by about 28 frames it looks like). What am I doing wrong? (This is the first time I'm trying this offline-then-online-process.) thanks.

Try exporting the iMovie project as a single full quality dv format quicktime file.
I use iMovie6 HD and this is my usual procedure that works well.
Make the movie in iMovie, will involve many separate clips. When finished, export (share) as a single full quality dv format quick time file. When I have an hours worth of smaller projects, I create a new iMovie project and import all of the quicktime .dv files for each separate short project. I add chapter markers in this project, then share with iDVD. I then burn an hours worth of stuff at best quality and distribute to family and friends.
iDVD seems to work better with iMovie source that has fewer clips.
BTW: Are you having problems with standard def or hi def iMovie source. Another part of my procedure is that I take the raw tapes and download the entire thing into one iMovie project. I don't edit or change the footage at all, just want to archive to DVD for posterity. In this case, I want to share the iMovie project with iDVD directly. This has worked OK for standard def projects, but my first hi def project (1080i) that I tried, the sound was out of sync. To fix this, I had to create a regular DV widescreen iMovie project, and drag all the clips into it from the HD project. It took over an hour for my humble mac mini to convert the files, but I was then able to share with iDVD and the finished DVD worked ok.
Hope this helps.

Audio/Video Out of Sync While Using Media Manager

While viewing most video files through Media Manager, the audio is a fraction behind the video. It is not significant but it is noticeable. I have looked at the Media Manager sticky but the posts are on all different areas where the Media Manager is flawed.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to correct this issue? I may just go back to using my original set-up. It's very surprising how bad this application is. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Hi mhiggins8450, I just read your post about the trouble you're having with the Media Manager. Have you had this problem since installing the software or has this issue just started recently? If it's been a problem since the beginning, you may want to look at removing the software and reinstalling a fresh copy. The newest version can be found at:
http://www.verizon.com/mediamanager
If it's a problem that just started happening, you may want to try and reset the units. The best way to do this would be to power down your PC, unplug the router and unplug your STB. Leave everything unplugged for five minutes. From this point, plug the router back in and wait for it to boot up (the Internet light will go GREEN when it's complete). Now plug the STB back in and wait for the time to display on the front of the box. Now turn your PC back on. Test the Media Manager and see what happens.
If you're still having troubles, please don't hesitate to re-post or send me a direct message.
Thanks!
Karl
Verizon Support
Notice: Content posted by Verizon employees is meant to be informational and does not supersede or change the Verizon Forums User Guidelines or Terms or Service, or your Customer Agreement Terms and Conditions or Plan.

Example of workflow using media manager and files with 5DMkII

Greetings,
I hope someone can shed some light on this problem. I am trying to figure out how to take files from the 5DMkII(apple proRes 422) and edit low rez files on a laptop and port them back to a desktop for final hi res finishing? I've read around but I am still confused. haven't found any difinitive answers yet nor a complete tutorial on Media Manager. Please help.
Hassan
using one intel core duo laptop, one intel mac Pro, both with lots of ram and the newest final cut suite.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=offlineonline+final+cutpro
Shows a surprising number of resources out there. One:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/offlinert.html
is a few years old, but the concepts are all still valid.
Patrick

Error when trying to use Media Manager in Desktop V4.3

Whenever I try to use desktop manager v4.2, and now 4.3, with my Windows Vista laptop, I get "The certificate file is missing or has been corrupted. Please re-install it." What do I need to do to fix it?

search the kb for the clean uninstall make sure its squeaky clean
then go ahead and and download desktop manager 4.3
right click on it make sure to select run as administrator.
make sure you select "install for everyone"
complete install
then try using program again. your chances of sucess here are entriely based on you clean uninstall. makes sure its squeeky
im not so good with advice. can i interest you in a sarcastic comment?

Vtserver.exe cpu usage at close to 100% when using Media Manager

On an Intel P4 PC running 32-bit Windows XP (sp-3), 2 GB of RAM and 500 GB hard disk, hardwired 100 Mbs connection:
When attempting to stream video from the MM PC to the DVR, the video is choppy. Upon examination of the processes running on the MM PC, VTServer.EXE is running at about 90-100% when streaming video. There is plenty of available memory.
Media Manager software has been uninstalled and reinstalled.
MM video component check has been run.
New MM version check run - no new version.
No SW firewall software/hardware in place.
Virus Scan disabled.
DVR has been rebooted.
Router has been rebooted.
Videos play without problem on the PC either via Windows Media Player or via the Media Manager player. The problem is when they are streamed to the DVR (choppy video/audio)
When playing videos, choppy video and audio is observed.
Does anyone have an idea what the problem is?

ak2,
Pls check your PMs. Thanks.
Regards,
Chris
Christian
Verizon Telecom
Fiber Solution Center
Notice: Content posted by Verizon employees is meant to be informational and does not supercede or change the Verizon Forums User Guidelines or Terms or Service, or your Customer Agreement Terms and Conditions or Plan.

Using Media Manager to Decompose offline clips only (Like Avid)

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