That is where my idea would come in handy, "REPLACE" function.

I decided my curiosity was more important than work this morning and done some testing.

Just manually creating the aliases doesn't work, FCPX must need the database reference and not just look at the folder for the files to create proxies from, which makes sense.

But this not so elegant solution, or get out of trouble bottom of the barrel fix, does work if anyone has deleted their original media and later decides they could have done with creating proxies.

Copy the ProRes files from the "Transcoded Media - High Quality Media" folder to a new location on a drive and relink the event files to the copies, now proxies can be created.

But, as FCPX updates the database it also deletes the previous optimised media. Simply moving the copies you created back into the "Transcoded Media - High Quality Media" folder (where they were sourced from) gives you back the option to work with optimised or proxy media.

The aliases to the original media can be deleted from the "Original Media" folder.

Scrubelicious wrote:
You were right all along....bravo

dgwvideo wrote:
Yeah... I know

hi

I'm the original poster of this topic, and since I am not short of HDD space, so far I have just kept both the original files and the optimised.

But now I am thinking about making some backups and the hours and hours it will take to do so. So, my original question was backwards. When a project is finished, it seems better to delete the optimised media and keep the original. For example, one project original media is 20GB but the optimised is 113GB! I'd much rather dump the optimised and keep the original, especially since this is for finished projects. However, I am wondering if I could ever reconnect the original media should I want to do further work at some time in the future. Any one know if this can be done?

If you've kept the original media anyway and want to have smaller backups that's the way to go.

When set to do so FCPX will look for optimised/original media giving optimised media priority if it's there, if not it will look to the original media. So if you delete the optimised media you won't need to reconnect the original media it will get it automatically.

Just going to give you my money's worth here. I am not a pro editor and disk space is at a premium so I do the following: I have my original footage stored on my external HDD, I import footage and create Proxy files (don't make copies in event folder)do all my editing with the proxy files for speed and when it comes to exporting I switch back to the original footage for quality. Then I delete the proxy media files to save HDD space.