Working with same events and projects on different Mac's

I sorted out the jitters and the spinning val, thank you Ben. The next question that I have is that I had done a couple of hours on my MacBook Pro, out of the office yesterday. I have now come into the office, plugged in the portable hard drive into my 27" in the hope to carry on where I left off yesterday.
I can't! The events and projects, although there on the import media pop-up, will not load on to the 27" desktop.
Does that make sense?
Thanks for you help guys.
J

Hi,

Are the Final Cut event and project folders in the root directory of the portable drive? That's the only place FCPX will find them on any drive (other than the OSX System drive where it also looks in the Movies folder of your Home directory).

Ian.

Hi Ian,
Sorry mate, this software is new to me! Can explain what the root directory is, and how i would know the events and project folders are indeed there. I have heard that mentioned a few times.

When you double click on the portable drive in the Finder you are, initially, seeing the root directory - essentially the whole contents of the drive. FCPX looks in here (only) for its project and event folders.

If you want to move projects and events between machines you should use FCP to duplicate them to the portable drive (if they are on the internal (System) drive of the MBP - which is not recommended).

Given a fast Thunderbolt or FW800 external drive you can get maximum flexibility by ensuring that your projects and events live on it. Use FCP to create or copy them there and they will be in the right place. Connecting the drive to any Mac would then allow you to work immediately. You need to back that drive up to avoid potential misery of course.

Any custom templates or plugins that you have used in your project need to be present on all machines.

Does that help?

Ian.

The most likely problem is that there is a folder on the root level of the drive called something like Video or Private or DCIM or something that FCP is seeing as a camera hard drive, hence the import window. Rename that folder and all should be good.

I'll have to try that out Tom - I didn't realise that FCP would be confused by other items in the root apart from its own folders. Interesting...