Color Media Storage Locations

In the box for Final Cut Studio, there's a little book that details how to set up Color. I think you'll probably find info in there that will help you assign the media and render directories. The User Manual goes into this far better than I can as well.

Yes, you can store the media somewhere else besides the home user/documents folder.

Shortie,

Please look at page 103 of the User Manual. It's spelled out that in the user preferences that is where you set your media and render directories. This isn't an Apple problem, it's an user error problem and don't let that get you down, I'm the Kind of User Error.

When you're done with this, the user guide does make for interesting reading. I would also suggest digesting the Release Notes as this text will save you a world of grief.

Hard drives are called Volumes in Color.

My post should have read that I'm the King of User Error.

Dude, did you bother to try to set the destinations in the user preferences of the setup room? The first time you open Color it asks you to set the default destinations but you can manually set the destinations wherever you want in the User Preferences. I don't get what you're not understanding. To reset the defaults, you need to trash the Color preferences.

Read the Release Notes. You can either work with Color and it's quirks and shortcomings or not, complaining about motion effects and other problems here ain't gonna do a bit of good.

Z.

Regardless of what you have read, have you even tried to set the render directory, project directory and media directory to somewhere other than your home directory? Go ahead and try it, I dare you. No, I double dog dare you.

On page 103 of the Color Users Manual:
Default Projec Dir.:The default directory where all new Color projects are saved. This is also the default directory that appears in the dialog boxes for the Import EDL and Import XML commands. "Click the Browse button to choose a new directory."

And for the Media & Render directories, same thing, Click the Browse button to choose a new directory. They can be found in the Setup room in the User Prefs tab.

Maybe a bit of confusion here is what is a "default" and what isn't.

Rest assured that you CAN store projects and media just about anywhere you want. It all happens in the Setup Room, in your User Preferences Tab, and the Project Settings Tab. Be aware that these tabs require review with every project, and must be set properly in order not to flush your work down the toilet. They also must be checked/set up at the outset BEFORE you start coloring your brains out and hit the render button.
The file system and browser protocol is not straightforward. It does require some Unix-think. When I launched with Final Ouch a few years ago, for the longest time, I could not figure out why I was not presented with a browser dialogue when I invoked the "import" command trying to bring a clip into the app. Not the right question! First, one must navigate to the clip, select it, and then you get to import it. Sometimes its just as simple as how the question is phrased. It was expecting me to tell it where something was before it could import it... and I wanted it to present some options to me because I wanted to import... something... sometimes I don't know exactly where that something is parked....

Click the little folder to the left of the location string dialogue. It opens up the universe.

Accusing COLOR of being a slapped-together PC application betrays something about the writer, and the overall history of this product.
If it did show you all that compositing/Motion stuff, then it would BE Final Cut/Motion/Shake/After Effects, blah, blah, blah. Which it isn't. It is a color grading application. I think there might be something in the manual that states that, but why bother with all those pesky words?

JPO

You're right JP,

Colour was a poorly slapped together Unix program, not PC!

The file browsing system is particularly bad, even for a Unix based app. Not having any kind of 'favourites' ability like shake does, or nuke, or most apps, or having access to the osx finder and sidebar is unbelievably frustrating and makes changing primary/secondary etc grade locations per project unbelievably tedious.

That aside, well done or putting up with such a silly post to begin with.

Cheers,

Toby

Ok to answer your question U go to "Preferences>User Preferences> Default Render Directory(or one of the other ones)" then you click "Browse" and then click on the "Directory" on the window dat pops up, then click on the "/" and then scroll down to the "volumes" folder and WA-LA!!! Find your external or other HDD and your all fixed and rdy to go! Happy "COLORING"!!!

Thanks for this information as I have also experienced a problem with colour storing files in the home directory. Unfortunately I am very new to final cut and colour and am half way through a project having coloured four seperate sequences as I am working with underwater footage and now cannot retrieve the files I have produced in colour. I was rendering the final sequence yesterday when a received an alert that there isn't enough space on the drive. I am confused by the way the system was set up in the first place and over the past week I have spent lots of time moving files around and trying to relink projects in Final cut pro. I am afraid I have made a complete mess.

The main problem at had is getting my files to a larger raid or drive that colour and final cut pro recognises. I have followed your steps preferences > default render Dir> /xdas-primary/library/colour documents/ I am ok to here however at this point in the finder I can see my files which I moved from users/ lynn to the xdas primary however in colour I can only see an untitled folder not the folder containing renders or media etc. How can I get colour to recognised that these files exist in this directory?

Help please I have a deadline in another two days!

Ooh.... good one, Lynn.

Looks like you need to consolidate, and the first thing that occurs to me is a Media Manage. You are up against the notorious reputation that FCP has for freaking out about the least little thing different about media -- size, type, location, date-of-manufacture, anything and everything.

Ask anybody who has had to laboriously re-connect everything clip by clip.

Your corrections/grades, if you ever need to re-apply them are probably safe. There are ways to import them either en masse, or one at a time into a new project. If you are a sequence short of completion, and you got tripped up by the lack of storage, then moving the project with Media Manage, creating a new (identical) sequence and a new COLOR project, then Import Corrections from the previous project might work. Render to your new (massive) storage site, and back to normal -- the new kind of normal that we all live in, of course. (Remembering that we are all now psychotic paranoid schizophrenics...)

jPo 8vP

Hi JP Owens,
Thanks for the response. At this stage I am ready for a breakdown. Ok I have updated preferences in Colour so that future file swill be saved to a larger hard drive and I now know I need to do this at the very beginning of a project.

However my problems to date are:
1/ Setting up a good work flow and storage facility.
I have the start up disk which is full mainly with applications but also the files for FCP which someone else loaded. To cut to the chase I was thrown on board with a system and taught basic editing. However the major oversight on all accounts was a run down on the system itself and how the drives are connected and backed up. I was not taught how to file and store information/ back up etc. Now I am working backwards.
There were so many files with the same names in different drives- however they contained different information. I Have probably stuffed up by trying to copy the files directly to other folders with the same names in different drives. I didn't know to use media manager.

I have just opened sequences that I had colour corrected, added smooth cam and just about finished all rendered etc and now all the links are missing. just to rerender is going to take ages.

Is there anything i can do to back track?
Honestly I am loosing it.

How do you suggest I store files / a good work flow plan in future so this doesn't happen?

Any advice you can give me will be helpful.
Thanks
Lynn

I am literally out the door in a minute so can't go into much detail. Media Mangler, as it is occasionaly referred to, is not that complicated for simply picking up a project and moving it -- don't go into the fine print, just do the defaults for now and for the most part it will be helpful in getting the chaos settled.

We have all been through this at one point or another and just take a breath and relax, no airliners are going to crash at sea. If a great deal of your material is already rendered, consider doing a Gather to consolidate it. The clips are rendered in order, and have numbered file names, so it IS possible to reconstruct a sequence by picking them all up and dropping them straight onto a timeline.
Then sorting which ones need to be moved, possibly up onto V2, etc.

There are archive files, both in FCP and in COLOR.

Good work flow involves forward planning and estimation of storage requirements, both in capacity and data transfer speed. For up to DVCProHD, even an external FireWire800 Terabyte drive will stand you in excellent stead.

I'll be back in the office in a couple of hours.

jPo

Hi Jp Owen,
Ok the problem it turns out is far more serious than that now as I have moved files i shouldn't have.
I am deleting file sin trash and going to shut down and restart hopefully I can create some space on my start up disk.
Then I will see where i am up to.
Now I have removed key files from my user including FCP documents I am unsure how to reconfigure everything without reading the manual and a lot of time.