Moving media between machines

Brian,

Due to the application sandboxing, X2Pro doesn't know if the media files have moved (or not) until you give it access to the locations that the FCPXML is pointing to.

If you give X2Pro access to the locations that are referenced in the FCPXML, it will then be able to discover that they are not there and will then give you an error message explaining that the media files could not be opened because they were not where the FCPXML said they were. In this error message, X2Pro will display the absolute path to the file that it was not able to open and suggest that you check that it really is there. I think this is the error message that you say would be helpful.

X2Pro can't give you that error message until you have granted it access to the locations that it thinks it should be looking in, because all it knows is that it's not permitted to look there.



X2Pro is designed to be used on the same machine FCP X is used on, so trying to run it on a different machine like this is technically unsupported, but can be coaxed into working this way if it really has to.

I would expect (though I can't guarantee) that consolidating your project to an external drive, then exporting that FCPXML, should allow you to use X2Pro on a different machine because (as you say) the external drive will probably be mounted at the same location on both machines, meaning the absolute paths should be correct.

Alternatively if you are comfortable editing the xml, you could adjust (e.g. find/replace) all the paths in the FCPXML to point to a different location. This should not cause a problem for X2Pro (assuming you changed the paths correctly and remembered to correctly url-encode the paths)

Thanks for your reply.
It is odd that an app that deals with media can not re-link to media files at a new location. It’s not an issue of sandboxing. The issue is that the app, for whatever reason, cannot locate the media. If I allow X2Pro into my 'sandbox' on a drive that holds ALL of my media for a project, the error should not be about sandboxing. A much more helpful error might be that X2Pro can not re-parse absolute paths.


Theoretically, should I be able to FIRST save and consolidate an FCPX project on external drive? Then I can open the project from the external drive and export an .xml file. The absolute paths would then all point to media on the external drive. Then, when we go to our audio machine X2Pro should be able to see all the media on the external drive, because it will still be at "/Volumes/ExternalDrive/Media/..."

Alternately, is there any reason doing a find and replace for the file paths in the .xml file would not work?

Hi Brian,

It is possible to use X2Pro to convert a project on a different machine to the one it was created on, but it's not a simple operation. I'll explain why:

The FCPXML that X2Pro reads contains paths to all the clips that you have used in your project, these paths are URLs, like this:As you can see, they are absolute paths to a specific place on your computer, so if you move your fcpxml from one machine to another and try to process it through X2Pro, all your media files will have to be in the exact same path. If you are using an external drive (USB or networked), they could well be in the correct location without you having to do anything special.

Like nearly all apps from the app store, X2Pro is a sand-boxed application. This means that the app is prevented from accessing files outside of the application itself unless the user grants it permission by browsing to a file or folder. For example when you browse to the fcpxml, you are granting access to that file, and when you browse to a folder for your aaf, you are granting access to that folder. When you convert an fcpxml using X2Pro, It needs to access all your media files in order to extract the audio, so permission must be granted to those files or locations. In recent versions of OS X, the fcpxml will contain "bookmarks" which automatically give X2Pro the permission that it needs to access the media files without the user having to grant access, but these bookmarks only work on the system that generated them so they become useless if the fcpxml is moved to another machine. In this situation the user must grant access manually to each media file.

The screen grab that you have attached is telling you that the fcpxml that you are trying to convert uses media in some locations that X2Pro is not allowed to access (yet) and it is asking you to give it access by adding it as a media location. You can either add the 3 inaccessible media locations that are listed by browsing to each one, or somewhat easier but potentially less secure, you can grant access to your whole machine by adding your main hard disk to the media locations (this will be listed as "\" in the media locations. Adding this location adds your whole system (including any mounted drives) to the media locations list, so X2Pro should never prompt you again to add a media location.

Can an XML file and associated media be moved to another drive, or does X2Pro require that all media stay in the hierarchy where it was when the XML file was created?

We have created an XML file and saved it on our edit machine. We then collected the project media to an external drive and copied the XML file to the external drive. We then hook up the external drive to our audio machine where X2Pro is installed.

We add the external drive root to the Media Locations. When we try to create the AAF, we get the error "Sandbox restrictions prevent X2Pro from accessing media. Please add media locations..."

We have tried multiple machines.
XML was exported from FCPX 10.1.1 We have tried X2Pro v1.1, v2.19 and v2.2 on multiple machines, with the same result.