Relinking to Media

[adamt]

i have been sent an FCP7 project edited using media transcoded to ProRes from Sony MXF.

I created an XML in FCP7 to bring the project into Smoke, but i want to tell Smoke to ignore the transcoded ProRes files and link back to the original MXF files (which i also have).

Is this possible?

and if it is, how do i do this?

thanks

Adam

[ManChicken]

Unlink any of the media if necessary, then go into the Conform tab and use 'Set Search Location', point it at the directory you want it to look in, and go about linking up the media as usual.

[adamt]

thanks - i'll give that a try..

...but its the "...go about linking up the media as usual."  bit that i'm unsure about.

As i mentioned, i am new to Smoke and Smoke seems to have its own idiosyncratic ways of doing just about everything!

adam

[ManChicken · Accepted solution]

The basic principle is that you need to have some sort of correspondence of what's referred to in the EDL/AAF/XML (your ProRes transcodes) versus the material you're trying to relink to (the original camera master files.)  At minimum this would be timecode, but hopefully you have some other qualifying field like the filename being similar, or the duration of the entire clip.

In the Conform tab you can 'Set Search Location' to point it at a folder to search in, and then in the 'Match Criteria' menu you can turn on and off various fields to tell Smoke what has to match exactly for a clip to be considered a match.  When matches are made, green checkmarks will appear next to the clips, at which point you can hit the Link button (or select specific ones and switch it to Link Selected) to actually link the media to the clips.  You can then go on selecting different criteria to deal with other problem clips, set a new search location, etc. until you've got everything linked.

If you select ambiguous search criteria (including nothing) some clips might show a little yellow card with a number, meaning it found multiple possible matches.  When you select one of the clips, at the top of the Media Library panel it should show all the media it found that could match, and you can select the proper one and ultimately Link Selected it.

[adamt]

thanks for the extra info...really appreciate all the assistance i'm getting from the good folks on the forum.

adam