I have a bit of a nightmare job, and was wondering if any fcp gurus can help.

My boss has been editing a documentary- she has limited knowledge of the workings of fcp, and as a result, the documentary footage is now spread across 3 hard drives, multiple projects, and is all a mixture of dv and hdv (which means any dv clip has to be rendered, which takes ages)

Its a right old royal mess, and the prjects are starting to get corrupt, with so much all over the place, render files going missing etc etc

So task has been given to me to media manage it all.

Where do i start? Should i get media manager to recompress everything as dv, to save on future renders? Should i try and manually sort it all out, getting all the footage in one place, then re-connecting everything?

I've found media manager can be a bit of a pain sometimes

I've done both and, frankly, I've found that manually moving and reconnecting the files to be my option of choice.

Media Manager can, obviously, do this for you, but I've found that it's much faster and better for my peace of mind to just open the project and then start moving files or folders full of files.

FCP will either update the paths automatically (if I simply rename a folder) or it will ask me where the files went (if I rename the files or cut/paste them someplace else) I reconnect, I save the project and I move onto the next folder worth of stuff.

As far as recompressing/converting all the HDV->DV or vise versa, I think that's another issue, but the fact you're working with multiple formats would also make me want to just manually move the files, just so you don't get to the end of your media-managing and find out that something was converted taht you didn't want to convert or whatever.

my 2-cents, YMMV

Amazon has Final Cut Studio 2 to be released on May 15th...the new version has an Open Timeline and will take any Codec/Format/Frame-Rate you can throw at it.

As far as a workaround now, yes, I would transcode everything to SD in this case. Also, getting stuff in one place will make it a lot easier.