Changing the Capture Scratch Folder's Name in FCP After Ingesting

When you're in a hurry and are loading in footage into FCP you may have forgotten to save the project before ingesting footage.

If you do, the folder in your Capture Scratch Folder will be called something like "Untitled Project" and if you keep loading in footage like this -saving after the fact- you'll end up with a pile of folders called "Untitled Project 1", "Untitled Project 2", etc…

The key is to remember to name and save your project BEFORE you ingest footage.

But what can you do if you've ingested footage, then saved the project but haven't quit Final Cut Pro yet?

You can -while at this point- go into the Finder and drill down to your Capture Scratch Folder and rename the folder containing the project's footage without the problem of FCP making you reconnect footage later on when you reopen the project, nor will it suddenly loose all connections to the footage.

Final Cut seems to get confused sometimes though; sometimes if you change the name of the footage's folder after quitting and reopening the project it'll find the footage, but sometimes it won't.

What I've noticed is that if you have saved the project after you ingested footage, but haven't quit Final Cut yet, it generally won't "loose" the footage when you return to it from the Finder.

Re-save the project and you should be go to go.

Keeping External HD's Cool

A friend of mine is working on a documentary about an unfinished, unreleased feature film that should be pretty interesting when completed. He's been loading in (digitizing) TONS of behind-the-scenes footage from 25+ year old poorly preserved VHS, Hi8 and VHC-C tapes to a pile of external hard drives. One of his hard drives decided this past week to seem to work fine capturing footage from tape but when he looked at the clips in FCP (and QuickTime) there were horrible show-stopping glitches that would actually hang FCP and QuickTime.

They seemed to occur at random intervals, about 2 hanging-glitches per 3 hours of capture.

I suggested after visiting him and putting my hand on one of the drives as he recaptured a 6+hour tape that he needed to cool it better somehow. External drives without fans usually don't last terribly long in my experience when working with video. We dug around and pulled out a small electric fan plugged it in (separate circuit from the HDs) and just pointed it at the drives, stopped the capture and started it fresh.

Later that night he called me thanking me that it seemed to have worked.