Media Management tool in Final Cut Pro

By John on June 20, 2008 3:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The media management tool in Final Cut Pro can be quite confusing. One VERY important thing to note is that the Media Management tool will not work with clips that do not contain time-code.

To verfiy this, take a look at the Media Start Columnto make sure each clip has actual time-code values other than 00:00:00:00. This is a real drag if you plan on using clips that inherently do not have timecode. (i.e. background animations, music from CD's, and multimedia movies),

As you can see in this screenshot, these particular clips do not have timecode information. Therefore the Media Manager will not work correctly with these clips.

Fortunately, there is a trick to add time-code back into the clips.

You can use one of two methods.

#1 Edit all your clips to a sequence. Set the sequence start time, and then export a self-contained QuickTime movie. Then re-import the movie into Final Cut Pro. The clip(s) will now work correctly within the Media Manager. *Do not export using QuickTime Conversion, because it will not preserve the FCP sequence timecode.

#2 For the die-hard tech geeks, you can use the QuickTime Developer tool to create a timecode track and manually change or add time-code information to each individual QuickTime movie.

After you've confirmed that all your clips have actual embedded timecode information, the Media Management tool will work correctly.