Event Restore weirdness & Madness!

Using FCPX to put together a rough cut for an audio podcast for a friend's book and am experiencing some unexpected behavior.

I created a disk image where I'm storing my event, my project library and all of my media. Nothing crazy. A single compound clip (I'm assuming its a compound clip - took a video clip, ran "open in timeline" and married a corresponding audio clip to it), a bunch of .wav files, and some mpeg 4 video clips with audio. The size of the event as of Friday was around 6GB. I made a duplicate of my disk image on Friday to take with me on my travel drive but wound up not working on it at all.

This morning I jumped back in to work on the project. I imported some new media that I did not on the other disk image, exported a few clips and right after doing so, experienced the beach ball of death. And was forced to "force quit" FCP X.

As you might expect, my event was corrupted. So I trashed the "CurrentVersion.fcpevent", grabbed the backup event file, renamed it and opened FCP X. No joy. I had an empty event. Went to the disk image on the travel drive, copied the "CurrentVersion.fcpevent" file from the event on the travel drive and pasted it into the event on the RAID.

FCP X opened without further complaint. But something weird occurred. The work that I'd done today; the files that I'd imported this morning- work that could not have been part of the "CurrentVersion.fcpevent" file that I copied and pasted, appeared in the event.

I'm happy because I have my event back, but I am very much confused. Can anyone shed some insight on what's going on?

"took a video clip, ran "open in timeline"

This is wrong. Don't ever do this. This function is for clip correction, stabilization, sync adjustment, color. It's not for editing. If you want to edit and add tracks to it, make a project and edit your clips into the project. You should not be editing media into another clip.

Good to know. Thanks!

Tom, I actually do that quite frequently when using external audio. I even add that audio to a clip by opening it in its own timeline AND put that edited clip in a multicam clip later on. I never encountered any errors so far. Why should I avoid it? (I actually do it to keep my projects less cluttered.)

Curious,
Sebastian

You're using it to sync video and audio. You're not adding multiple elements into the clip. It's not uncommon for users to open the clip in the timeline, add more audio, more clips, titles, transitions, and think they're editing a project. Sort of like this:

"took a video clip, ran "open in timeline" and married a corresponding audio clip to it), a bunch of .wav files, and some mpeg 4 video clips with audio."

To be clear:

I was taking an audio file and adding "marrying" it to the video clip so that they could be used as a unified clip forever and ever going forward. I was not attempting to use a clip opened in the timeline as a starting point to edit my entire project.

The bunch of .wav files and some mpeg 4 video clips with audio were the other contents of my event.

that's a known problem (at least by me - i've posted about that, sent descriptions and bug reports to apple)
the thing is that both events and projects don't save the real file path in the sql. there is a kind of auto-repair. this means if the paths stored in the event sql are not found fcpx will scan the original media folder within the event folder and build a temporary event. this will not be saved in the event nor in the project unless you reconnect all media in the event.

so before you work with a disk image or external drive for travel always reconnect media before you travel/move the stuff.

-andreas