Final Cut Pro HD | H•O•T Hands-On Training [Electronic resources]

5. DemoReconnecting Media

In this exercise, you'll learn why media needs to be reconnected and discover how to reconnect it. Final Cut stores the path namethe name of every folder between the name of your computer down to each individual media filewith each media clip. This makes sure that Final Cut knows exactly where every file is stored. The problem with this approach is that if you move a media file or, more commonly, rename any of the folders in which those media clips are stored, Final Cut loses track of the file. Reconnecting is not necessary all the time. But, if media is missing, this is the only option that puts things back in order.

Because Final Cut can't find the source media, it puts a red line through the clip name in the Browser, saying, "Help, I can't find the file."

This is where the organizing you did in Chapter 1 starts to pay off.

Chapter 1, "Get Organized"? Well, when you pointed your scratch disk to that folder, Final Cut created either three or six folders inside it, depending on how you set the rest of your preferences.

All captured media is stored inside the Capture Scratch folder.

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In the Capture Scratch folder, you'll see that Final Cut has created folders for every project you've created. (Again, your folders will be different from mine.) To see all the video I captured for this chapter of the book, I just have to look inside the Chapter 03 Lesson folder.

Using this system keeps everything clean and organizedprovided you name and save your projects before you start capturing media.

Now that you know where Final Cut stores media files (inside the folders named after project files and stored inside Capture Scratch), it becomes easy to reconnect lost files.

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