Is "Consolidate Media ..." Broken?

The fact that Consolidate moves the Event as well as the media does not surprise me.

I think you're missing the point, that the application does not move the media, it only moves events. If the media is linked to a single event it's not consolidated. It only looks at events, not at media.

Tom Wolsky wrote:

The fact that Consolidate moves the Event as well as the media does not surprise me.

I think you're missing the point, that the application does not move the media, it only moves events. If the media is linked to a single event it's not consolidated. It only looks at events, not at media.

Perhaps I am, Tom, however....

The exercise I conducted and posted about earlier showed me that Consolidate Media moves both the media and the Event within which it is contained.

In this case this was two Events containing media (I chose two so that I could check the behaviour with both copied and referenced media) located on an external hard drive and a single Event containing media located in the Final Cut Events folder on the internal hard drive. On invoking Consolidate Media within a Project containing this media, the media and the Events folders on the external drive were moved (they could have been copied, but I chose to move them) to the internal Final Cut Events folder on the internal drive where the Project file was located.

I can't help feeling we are getting bogged down in semantics here. Is this a chicken or egg situation? What comes first the Event or the media. For me the two are inextricably linked. Consolidate Media moves or copies the media but it also has to move or copy the Event. This is the way it appears to have been designed. If no consolidation takes place because all the media for a project is already on the same disk then no media or Events are moved or copied.

Alastair.

Hello 1 Open Loop,

Where were the Events for these media files located? If the clips are on different drives, but their associated Events were all located on the same drive, then FCPX would not see a need to consolidate.

My understanding and I have observed this in practice, is that in order for Consolidate Media to work, the clips and their Events must be located on a different drive from the Project.

From this perspective I can understand Tom's comment (sorry Tom I see what your getting at now) about this being Event consolidation and not Media consolidation but the purpose of the tool is to move media from one location to another and it does that, it's just that the media needs to be in an Event in order for this to happen.

I think Apple's own definition of this, which you included in your post, assumes although does not explicitly state that the media is contained within an Event and worse appears to assume that we have accepted this as a given.

Alastair.

Hello All!

I'm totally with 1 Open Loop here. The consolidate function is broken in terms as we know it.

I love FCPX very much because of it's intuitive workflow but that you have to duplicate a project with all used clips is a pain in the a**.

I'd love to get a option with the consolidate function that asks me whether I want to use the whole media or just the parts I used. Just edited a promo of 4 minutes and used a library of roughly 30 GB for it and now everything is beeing copied just in order to get into DaVinci without having too much hussle.

As well for archiving projects this seems to be very limiting.

Anyway thanks for helping out and understanding the matter better.

Consolidate Media is still broken.

One of the professional features we miss in Final Cut X is the Manage Media function. The manual indicates that FCPX has a weaker version of it, named "Copy Used Clips Only":

“Copy Used Clips Only… duplicates only those media files used in the project. This is different from the Final Cut 7 version in that it does not trim clips to only the used portion.”

However, that function is unreachable in common use. The manual reads:

“Control-click a Project and choose Consolidate Project Media. Select one of three options.”

One of those options is “Copy Used Clips Only”.

However, whenever I right-click a Project and choose “Consolidate media…”, FCPX stops me with:

Nothing to Consolidate
The selected project and the Events it refers to are already in the same location.

Which misses the point and contradicts the manual, because the options never appear. Has anyone figured out a way to get to the “Copy Used Clips Only” option? Or this simply errata in the manual?

Message was edited for clarity.

It appears that that protion of the manual is in error. What it is really referring to is the menu item "Duplicate Project…"

If all the media is in the same location there is nothing to consolidate.

Consolidate is used when you events in multiple locations.