Apple Final Cut Pro 6 - Manual (Page 1559)

76 Part I Media and Project Management
Reconnecting Clips to Media Files
Clips in your project don’t have to be offline for you to use the Reconnect Media
command. You can reconnect media files to clips in your project at any time, since all
you are doing is changing the file path stored in the clip’s Source property.
Reconnecting the links between clips and media files is the most obvious reason for
doing this, but there are other reasons to use the Reconnect Media command:
 To reconnect clips in your project to higher-resolution versions of the media files in
preparation for online editing
 To reconnect clips in your project to lower-resolution versions of the media files for
mobile editing, or to fit more media on a relatively small hard disk. This is usually
known as offline editing.
Note: The terms offline clip and offline editing are not related.
 To reconnect clips after you modify, move, or delete media files in the Finder and
return to Final Cut Pro
Differences Between Missing and Offline Media Files
Final Cut Pro considers any clip without a media file to be offline. However, the status
of the clip’s Source property determines whether Final Cut Pro continues to search for
a clip’s media file each time a project is opened.
If a clip’s Source property contains a file path and the media file cannot be found,
Final Cut Pro considers this clip’s media file to be missing, and Final Cut Pro warns you
about the missing media file each time you open the project.
If a clip’s Source property is empty, the clip is considered offline, but Final Cut Pro
does not search for the clip’s media file (since there is no path to search for). In this
case, you are not warned about missing media each time you open the project. For
example, if you simply log a clip, it does not yet have a media file associated with it,
and therefore its Source property is empty. In this case, Final Cut Pro doesn’t warn
you each time you open the project that the clip is missing its media file.
Final Cut Pro keeps track of which clips have missing media files until you explicitly
request otherwise. You can change the status of a clip from “missing” to simply offline
by clearing the clip’s Source property. You can do this several ways:
 Select the Forget option in the Offline Files dialog that appears when Final Cut Pro
detects that some clips’ media files are not in the expected location.
 Select one or more clips and choose Modify > Make Offline.