Reconnecting Offline Media in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to show you how to reconnect your media files that have gone off line. Let's go over now reconnecting media and how media gets disconnected in the first place. Well look over here in my browser. As you can see, we have a clip with a red line through it. Remember that from when we were capturing. Yeah, it's basically the same concept. The whole thing is when you bring a clip into Final Cut Pro in the browser, it associates it with a path directed towards a file on your hard drive. So if that path changes or the file gets deleted, it can no longer find it. So in this case, the name for this is changed in my hard drive. The file name is changed so it doesn't know where it is any more or what it is doing. Now when media is disconnected, you get this error saying media off line, tape 2-1. So if that's in your project or sequence, it will just say that instead of actually playing footage. It just says media off line. The time code and the in and out points are still all the same. It is just now it can't find it so it's an empty shell now. How do you reconnect that. Well, first of all you have to find where the footage is. If you know where it is at, you can reconnect it. So let's go ahead and just reconnect this by right clicking on it and go down to reconnect media. Okay, so you get this whole window that comes up for it. It tells you at the top here which files are off line. It gives you the option to skip the file if you have multiple files and then you can locate or search and it is asking you if you want to search a single location or if you want to search all the locations. Spike 5 is the name of my external hard drive which is where the file is at and that's fine so I just leave it as single. So if you click search, it will search that hard drive for the same name. So if you accidentally just moved the file, it should have no problem finding the file by searching for the name. In my case, the name has changed. I changed it for whatever reason so I am going to have to manually locate it. Just click locate. Okay, so now we need to find it. So it's in Spike and under capture scratch in my project folder. Now all of these are a great out. That's because it's not recognizing the name. What you want to do is come down here and where it says match name only uncheck that. Now I can choose a file to associate it with. You can choose between showing video files or all files. Since it is video, I am going to keep it video files. Now okay, that was tape 1-1. This is what I changed the name to. So all I have to do is click that and click choose and there you go, it is no longer up there. It's now in the files located bin down below and found the file. All I do is click, connect and boom. It's gone and now the clip works as it should."