The race starts, we have the first setback with FCPX

Today we imported footage in a new flavor: P2, DVCProHD Material shot as 1080p and 720p with 32 frames per second.

When importing P2 you have to use "File>Import from camera", and not "Import Files". We left the "Remove Pulldown" on. We chose to also click on "Optimize Media".

 The import took a while and we got several error-messages that stalled the import, so we had to sit next to it, but all clips ended up in the Event. The 1080p material was quicktime files and the 720p slomo-stuff showed up as P2-plugin files in my Event.

Then we ingested also XDCam and h.264 like yesterday. All seems to run smooth so far (as expected). The Merge Events works also. The only delay we had was when my h.264 was transcoded, I could´t merge the events but had to wait for that task to finish. Apparently the database needs to be in a quiet state before messing with it……that´s why you can´t rename folders or delete folders when background tasks are running.

The funny part is now the transcoding and re-wrapping takes a lot of time…the selection of your favorites and the edit itself is a "small part of the job". 

The new keyword selections are great for a race like this. We give every rider his racenumber (bibnumber) as a keyword (e.g. #112). Then created a folder Riders and now whenever we select a shot we keyword the number to it and can easily identify all shots for every participaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

major breakdown.

what happened now?

we did the same as yesterday. Stefan made his new Event with today's footage, copied it onto the Transfer Drive and Alban merged the Events onto Beast.

after a while, spinning beachball while merging. what to do? wait it out? force quit? after a while we decided to force quit FCPX.

So we reopened FCPX and tataaa, we have our original Event without files and collections, and the same event with the suffix "temp" with all the collections but without the media….and now?

we decided to close FCPX, and reopen it. This time our original Event found the files, but all the tags/metadata/keywords and collections were gone but still present in the "temp" project.

at that moment the producer - alban - was ready to pull the plug on our little project here and restart with fcp7. i disagreed.

thanks to the decision to copy all media into the event all the files are still there. the only thing missing is the metadata in the original Event.

in the "temp" Event we have all the metadata, but not the connection.

now we tried to copy one file from the original event into the "original media" folder of the "temp" event, and after reopening FCPX the "temp" event reconnected this file correctly.

so we thought we just copy the FCPX "currentversionFCP" of the "temp" event into the folder structure of the original event and thereby getting our metadata structure back.

this worked.

now we retry merging stefan's Event of today with the Master-Event on Alban's Macbook Pro

and are still waiting for the spinning beachball to disappear…

hmmm…

again dead…

forced quit, and then - same again…

so we again replaced the "currentversionFCP" of the original event with the "currentversionFCP" file from the suffixed "temp" event and all is back except for the projects already prepared. so be it.

now, instead of merging the two events we MOVE stefan's event onto Beast and will try to merge later… 

stefan's event moved without any problems.

well… 

more on this tomorrow, because it's after midnight now, we have to finish the dayclip somehow and pack our stuff for tomorrow at 8am the next stage begins

moving all of us to italy….