Missing Proxy media

Why is FCP telling me it needs to link to some Proxy media when I never created proxy media in the first place!

• If you haven't created a proxy →Viewer display: Proxy only →The timeline is displayed in red →Red display is correct✅
• If you reconnect the proxy to the original media →Viewer display: Proxy only →Display the original on the timeline →Displaying the original by proxy only is a wrong connection❌

I see the missing proxy icon in the project and in the viewer I think.

This seems to be the file path to your original media.

It looks like you're relinking proxies to the original media files.

Normally proxies are in a specific proxy folder. It will normally be in a folder called Proxy Media inside a folder called Transcoded Media. There may also be a folder called High Quality Media for Optimized files. The application generates these folders in the designated storage location. Where is the designated storage location for your media?

If you switch to proxy playback and you never made proxy files, it will say Missing Proxies. It can’t find them where it thinks they should be. It doesn’t know you never recreated them. They may have been created in Compresor or by the camera during the original recording. It wants you to relink them to wherever they are.

If you selected Proxy in the View menu at the top right of the Viewer, and you do not have proxies, the program will - correctly! - say that they are missing. Nothing to worry about.

Just select Optimized/Original and all is well.

It never says No Proxies. It always says Missing Proxy if it can’t find it. If you switch to proxy playback it assumes there are proxies somewhere; it just can’t find them. Or that you’re going to make them and as they’re generated the project will populate with the new files.

PS. I do have one more question. Viewing the Original media folder inside the Library (package contents) I see several aliases with (fcp1) or (fcp2) after the name of the original file. Can anyone tell me why these designations are appended to the name, before the extension designation?

I believe this can happen when there are multiple files with the same name - for example, if you import (say) Clip001.mov from one card, and then another Clip001.mov from a different card, FCP cannot assign the same name to two files in the same folder, so it has to distinguish them somehow.

I don't think you should worry about the file names. One should not mess with the insides of a library bundle in Finder, unless in very limited circumstances and if you are fully aware of what you are doing. You risk corrupting the library. You can rename clips in FCP browser, if necessary, but don't expect that the name you assign has anything to do with the file name.

WilliamL wrote:

No I wasn’t planning on doing anything within the Library. I was just looking around and just curious. The appended files do not show up in the Browser, nor in the original media.

Precisely - that name change is internal and does not reflect in the user interface.

To see that in a perhaps more evident way: select a clip in the browser, say "Clip 1", control-click, Reveal in Finder. Probably it's called "Clip 1.mov"; now try renaming said clip in the browser, to something completely different, say "Potato", and again control-click, Reveal in Finder, and it is still "Clip 1.mov".

As you can see, these are files that would otherwise have the same file name, for example

2013-08-14 AA landing (fcp1).mov

2013-08-14 AA landing (fcp2).mov

They are both aliases, not the actual media files.

You can select each one in the Finder, press Command-I and check what the original file for each is.

Perhaps they both point to the same file? In any case, do not change any of that in the Finder.

WilliamL wrote:

I speculated earlier that they were different segments of the same original clip. I did use two parts of the clip in the Timeline.

No, there is no such thing as far as the files are concerned. You can use a hundred segments from a clip, there will always still exist only one file.