FCPX "Reconnect Media"?

[Albert C Martin]

Trying to work with Red files in FCPX that I have rendered to ProRes. However, I am having trouble finding a "Reconnect Media" function in the program. If I make some tweaks to the grade in RedCine after using the file in FCPX and render a new ProRes file, FCPX reports the file as "missing" even when it is overwritten with the same name. No ability to "Refresh" or "Reconnect" source media from what I can find.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Alexander Ibrahim]

I think that is one of the features that is sort of missing.

You have to render a new version and replace it with the versioning support, I think.

I read about this, but have not tried it myself yet.

[Jonathan Stevenson]

Wow... FCPX sounds worse every day.

[Ivan G]

Complaint: No Reconnect command when media is offline. When media is offline, you get a red screen with an exclamation point. There is no Reconnect Media command, as there used to be.

Answer: True. Then again, the old Reconnect dialog box got people into a lot of trouble; they often reconnected a project to the wrong files, or the wrong versions of files.

FCP X assigns a unique behind-the-scenes identifier to every single video clip. When you reconnect the missing hard drive, your project reconnects to its original files automatically, even if you have moved them around or renamed the hard drive. You can’t reconnect to the wrong thing.

Yes this is dumb friendly

[Jake Bastian]

They took it away because sometimes people reconnect to the wrong files? What a joke! The few times you did happen to connect to the wrong file there was a VERY easy solution: "Reconnect Media"!!!

[Graeme Nattress]

This one even caught me out the other day! Sure you can screw up with reconnect media, but the possibility of screw-up is better than having no reconnect option at all!!!!!

Graeme

[Albert C Martin]

This one even caught me out the other day! Sure you can screw up with reconnect media, but the possibility of screw-up is better than having no reconnect option at all!!!!!

Graeme

Agreed. I edited an entire video this week using ungraded Quicktime proxies from the Epic. Only after the project was finished and I graded everything did I find out that FCPX recognizes it's a different file (even with the same codec, length and resolution) and refuses to let me reconnect. I appreciate FCPX trying to be helpful and automating the reconnect process ... but at least give me a way to go around it if I need to.

I usually make quite a few round trips between FCP and RedCine during the course of editing. This is kind of a workflow killer for me unless I can figure a way around it.

Now I did find out that you can replace media in the timeline with the new version of the footage by just dragging the new file from an event directly on top of the clip on the timeline and choosing the "Replace at Start" or "Replace at End" Many downsides to this however. First off, if you've trimmed your media on the timeline at all you'll have to extend the beginning or end of the clip temporarily to keep sync. Second, you have to do this for each and every clip on the timeline. Use the same footage twenty times on your timeline and you'll be going through each clip one by one. Lastly, if you've applied any keyframes, filters, or changed settings on scale/rotation/etc. this will be reset.

Obviously not a solve, but it did save me from a recut at 5AM with the graded footage. Hoping to find a good solve because so far I've really enjoyed learning and working with FCPX. Without some kind of basic reconnect function I may have to go back to FCP7 when working with any Red footage.

[Brad Webb]

You have got to be kidding me.

[Chris Kenny]

You can't manually reconnect individual clips, but you can use 'Modify Event References' in the project properties to point reconnect a whole sequence to a different set of media.

Note that FCP X has entirely automated built-in support for proxies, so you don't need to do any explicit reconnection of anything for simple offline/online cases. Just tell it to generate proxies on import (or later, with the 'Transcode Media' command), and then from Preferences you can choose whether you're editing the original media or the proxy files. You can flip back and forth seamlessly.

[Albert C Martin]

You can't manually reconnect individual clips, but you can use 'Modify Event References' in the project properties to point reconnect a whole sequence to a different set of media.

Sounds great in theory, but just tried to do this and was unsuccessful. I may be doing it wrong, but when I click "Modify Event Resources" I am unable to select any other Event even when I have another event with all the new colour corrected footage from the project. It seems to recognize that these are different files even though they are the same file name/codec/length/etc.

Note that FCP X has entirely automated built-in support for proxies, so you don't need to do any explicit reconnection of anything for simple offline/online cases. Just tell it to generate proxies on import (or later, with the 'Transcode Media' command), and then from Preferences you can choose whether you're editing the original media or the proxy files. You can flip back and forth seamlessly.

Works great on 5D footage since it ingests the raw files. Right now, this isn't too helpful for Red files since native R3D support isn't included yet.