Recapturing a Project

You've finished editing a project, output a finished copy to tape, and exported a QuickTime movie of the sequence. The next step is the most important thing you can do to back up your hard work: save a copy of your project file somewhere safe. Once you've saved your project file, you can delete the media files to free up hard-drive space and allow room for another project.

As soon as you delete the media files associated with a project, or even move them as you saw earlier in this lesson, the clips in the project will become offline. They will appear with a red diagonal line across them in the Browser and will be white clips in the Timeline. But the project file still retains all the information that was used when you originally captured the clips, all the Ins and Outs of the clips in the Timeline, all the filters used or effects created, and so on, even though the media is no longer available.

If you ever need to re-edit the original project, you won't have to re-enter any logging information. You can simply open the project file and recapture the media files, using the existing clip information in the project. When you have a need to recapture a project's media files, you can use the following steps as a guide.

Note

This process will only work correctly if there are no time-code breaks on your tapes.

1.	Open the project file for the project whose media you want to recapture.
2.	Choose File > Capture Project, or press Ctrl-C. Note You can also choose Capture Project from within the Capture window (Cmd-8), which you worked with in Lesson 12. The Batch Capture window opens, where you can choose to capture all or selected items in the project, add handles to the existing clip lengths, and choose a capture preset.
3.	Click OK. The Insert Reel dialog box appears, indicating which tape reel to place in your playback source to begin capturing.
4.	Insert the requested reel and click Continue. When Final Cut Express has finished capturing all the necessary clips from the first tape, it will display the Insert Reel dialog box again if a second reel was used. Insert the next tape in the list. Continue to insert tapes until Final Cut Express has finished capturing your entire project. When all the media has been captured, the clips will once again be linked to the media, and you will be able to continue working in your project.
5.	Press Cmd-S to save the current configuration of the project.