Merged Events - Missing Clips

First post. Trying to help a friend who has been capturing (digitizing old u-matic tapes from a doc he did in the 70’s)
He is using FCPX 10.0.5 on a pretty late model iMac and was capturing thru a canopus Grass Valley converter.
He is new to NLE’s and it was my recommendation on the iMac and FCPX to digitize.
Yesterday he called and said he was finally done capturing; he had hundreds of tapes.
Over the phone he described to me all of the events he had created. One per each tape or portion of tape named after whatever he was looking at.
He then named the clips pretty much the same as the event.
I suggested he should have made one event and then named the clips and said because he named every single thing we could merge all the clips to one event named after his doc.
He proceeded to do this the iMac churned for a minute and voila; one event and immediately every clip went offline.

I’m just getting back from his house after trying to sort out this mess.

What I think happened is this:
As he was importing one event per tape the canopus was naming every clip with the identical name; a long string of numbers. Looks like as long as they were in separate events (Finder Folders) everything was cool.
As soon as he merged it pared hundreds of clips to three clips in the new event. One of which was the same string of numbers name the other 2 same number name but appended FCP1 and FCP2.

Most of the originals are on a time machine backup but it hadn’t been running since Feb 1 of this year.
So everything since are the ones I’m worried about.

$64,000 question are the physical clips still somewhere i can’t see or find?

Sorry for the long post but could sure use some suggestions.

Thanks
Bob

Hi Bob,

If he's on 10.0.5 there should be an Event folder on his drive with inside it an Original Media folder that contains all the physical media he has imported into the Event. If the media are still there he can give every clip in the Original Media folder a distinct name, create a new Event and import the renamed clips from the Original Media folder of the old Event into that new Event.

He really should not be using such an outdated version of the application. Updates have been free from the start, so there is no reason for him not to update.

- Ronny