How to search for offline media AFTER project load

zoidicus wrote on 12/7/2014, 4:28 PM
Just to be clear, this is NOT about the bug/feature concerning closing of files when VMS goes to background.

I re-arranged my original media folders, and now when I open a project I get the whole mess with offline media. It's to be expected. I changed the paths slightly. I DO get the prompt to search for media, and it works....sort of. The problem I have is that many of the offline files have the same names, and differ only by the folder in which they reside (you can thank GoPro for that). Furthermore, the VMS offline files dialog box doesn't show the whole path of the offline file, so I can't see the all-important folder name that gives me the context I need to tell it which file to replace it with. So I decided to leave all media offline, finish loading the project, and then opened the Project Media window. There I can see the full original path of each file, but I can only repair 1 file at a time. VMS doesn't pick up on the change and offer to fix the others. There are 101 files in this project alone, and several other projects, so I'd rather not do this one at a time.

Is there a media search/re-connect feature available AFTER the project is loaded? Something that I'm failing to see? Is there an add-in that would accomplish this?

Movie Studio Suite 12, build 1184.

Chris

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 12/7/2014, 4:59 PM
I'm not sure a media search feature would be much help, if your issue is that you have several files with the same names.

I'm afraid you have a bit of a mess on your hands, due to the whole duplicate file name issue. I know of no other way to reconnect all of those files other than doing them one at a time.
zoidicus wrote on 12/7/2014, 6:05 PM
It seems the situation is even worse than I feared. The project is a 3D project, and when I go to "replace" the media, nothing happens. It lets me browse to and select a replacement file, but then the screen flickers and the project media list looks unchanged.

This is one of those few times when I really miss Adobe Premiere's XML files. I could use a simple text editor to fix the file paths in less than a minute. I suppose I could program to manipulate the VF file directly. ewww.
zoidicus wrote on 12/7/2014, 7:25 PM
I found a work-around:

I created a symbolic link in the old (original) file structure that redirects to the new file structure. The media all shows online now.

Chienworks wrote on 12/8/2014, 7:20 AM
This shows why it's often a good idea to do some media management and renaming before starting the project. Any of the free bulk renaming utilities would have made it a snap to make sure all the Go Pro files had unique names.
zoidicus wrote on 12/8/2014, 8:35 PM
Chienworks,

I'm not familiar with those, but I did a quick Google search and found a lot of references to such utilities. Looks like a pretty mixed bag. Do you have a favorite one? Or several specific ones I should look into?