Offline alert icon but no media is offline?

One of my sequences, er, projects suddenly is showing the alert symbol in its icon, but none of the media appears offline. I forced a relink anyway, and after everything successfully connected the icon remained there. Should I be concerned? I may create a new project and paste this one into that and see if that helps.

thanks,
Bill

Hi Bill,

Sometimes FCP X just warns you that your project (or sequence, or whatever people want to call it ) has been changed since it was last exported.

But it would be helpful if you could post a screenshot of the alert icon so we can tell you exactly what it means.


- Ronny

Thanks, Ronny.

I went through my timeline clip by clip and found two shots from the same source that were not labeled as offline, but they were not visible either. The thumbnail icon was black and match framing back to the source kicked up an error that I'll attach as an image. I eye-matched those two shots back in, using a client approval QuickTime as a reference and the alert icon went away. Crisis averted, but why did these clips suddenly go bad?

Bill

I guess I'm thankful that the alert icon exists, because if something similar happened in FCP7 I may not have noticed until much later.

One last note of odd behavior- while troubleshooting the sequence I attempted to make a Duplicate as Snapshot, and it simply wouldn't. No error, but no dupe either.

Bill,

My guess is the source media got corrupt somewhere in the process, or the simlinks to the media got lost. FCP X will not let you create duplicate snapshots of edits that have missing or problematic media on the timeline. I think that's a very good thing.

Is everything working as expected now?


-Ronny

I sure hope the clip isn't corrupted- that media file (a two hour ProRes QuickTime) is referenced in dozens of timelines across this project. It only went off the rails in that one sequence. The other ones are still holding strong for the moment.

Thanks,
Bill

If it is only giving you trouble in one particular sequence I wouldn't worry about it. I would just avoid exporting or duplicating Projects that have disabled clips on the timeline. Keeping the timeline sleek makes FCP X happier

-Ronny

Yes I have found this annoying behavior too. For me it happened when I needed to bring back a section from an earlier snapshot. For some reason FCP X seems to have different paths to the media from snapshots and projects.

It resulted in me having to re-edit some shots into the project because they were showing as offline even though they weren't.

That timeline is haunted. After manually replacing those errant shots, I opened X today to find that my multicam clips in the storyline were all labeled as "(missing)." I'm using that same multicam source across at least 10 other sequences and they appear fine. After rebuilding the sequence (again) the alert icon persisted, so I exported the timeline as an XML and brought it back in.

Bill

Hi Bill,

Exporting to XML is a good idea.

BTW what happens when you copy the contents of that sequence and paste it into a freshly creates one? Do you still have the issues?

-Ronny

Copying and pasting to a fresh sequence brings the alert icon along with it, even after I had fixed the issues. The XML roundtrip to the desktop seems to have fixed it.

Thanks,
Bill

Thank you for the heads-up. Good to know.

-Ronny