SyncTwoFolders

SyncTwoFolders is a simple FREE app that will sync two folders. I've gotten mixed up with a project that's messy, to put it nicely, and while FCP's media manager is great, in this particular case just hooking up the various hard drives and syncing up the folders is what's needed initially before the real media management can take place. And by various hard drives I mean the occasional USB flash drive. Seriously. Messy.

So looking around I found SyncTwoFolders today and it's not bad. Plus, it's free. It wasn't originally written in English so keep that in mind when you find an odd phrase or word choice in the app.

Search Folders

If you're reconnecting a lot of media in your projects or have Media Managed a lot of them it helps to tell FCP where to search first. In FCP hit Shift + Q to bring up the System Settings and then click on the second tab marked Search Folders.

Tap the Set... button and select the folders and drives where your media is. It may help a bit it may not, try it and see how it does for you.

Media Manager File Naming Issue

I'm not sure what's causing this issue I've seen on a few stations but when you highlight all the media in the Browser and then select Media Manager (I've set my key command for this to be Option + Command + M) and go through all of the steps (Copying media over, btw) sometimes I'll see an error message like this:

Media Manager File Copy Failed

The attempt to Copy "file" to "/Volumes/Name/Folder/Folder/Media/Folder" failed with an error code of 1"

Or it'll read something like it failed "due to lack of disk space."

What I've noticed is that the file is fine, and there's plenty of room to copy it over. But, for some reason either the Media Manager or, more likely, the Finder decided to rename the file.

Usually it occurs with .wav files. For example, if a file is named "soundfx.wav" when the Media Manager tries to copy it the file will appear as "soundfx.wav.mov" and Media Manager or the Finder gets all confused.

So far I don't have a solution to the problem and if you copy the file over and remove the ".mov" from it and reconnect it the project will be fine. I just need to track down where along the process the file's .mov extension appears.

Concerning file sizes and the inability of Media Manager to copy them and spitting out the lack of dick space error, I've noticed that it will copy a 1.55 Gig file but won't copy a 3.1 Gig file. So perhaps somewhere in between those two sizes is the maximum size of a file that it can copy over because of this bug. If it is a bug.

Media Manager Key Command

In FCP 6 the Media Manager doesn't have a key command assigned to it. I like to use Command + Option + M.