Just wanted to go over some basic project and media management thoughts, that will hopefully help all.

Projects - Create a project using a name that easily identifies what is in the project. ie. Jane_John_Wedding.....or SummerVacation2005 or Dingleberrys_Commercial_June05

The project files are stored on the C: drive in the programs files>Avid>AvidLiquid7>Projects path

Sequences - In the project is stored the Sequences, or Timelines, you can have multiple, but make sure the sequence you're creating belongs in that project, otherwise you may not find it easily in the future....

Media - Media or the video should be stored in a folder on your media drive that relates to the project, and should be captured in the same project.

CLIPS- Clips are the "metadata" pointers within a project, that point to the actual video files sitting on your hard drive. They are directed to, or linked by the Media Management window. The Media Management window is the switchboard, or patch panel of Liquid.

When you open the logging tool to capture your summer vaction footage, you should be in the SummerVacation2005 project.

Use the AV button on the bottom of the logging tool, to open the Media Management. Use the ADD button to add a folder, SummerVac2005 to your media drive. Media Management will automatically add a sub folder named REELS in which it will then store each tapes footage into a sub-sub folder.

If you have more than one tape, make sure you name each one uniquely. ie. SummerVac05_1, SummerVac05_2 and so on. Liquid uses Reel names (tape names) and timecode to keep the media organized. If you name all the tapes the same, each time you launch liquid the media will be attached to clips all over the place...

When you capture a tape, or parts there of, a clip is created in the project which points to the media on the drive.... and the video is stored on your hard drive as a video file, avi, diff, or m2v...

The other consideration; Render Directory - The render directory should be on the media drive, or another fast drive, but never the C: drive.. as they take over as media files on clips with FX or multiple layers.

So there's some basics. I could go on, but my computer is starting to smoke....

Take a look at your media management settings. Make sure there are links to the locations of your media. Not the REELS sub folder, but the folder right above. Hopefully you've been capturing to folders that describe your project. A new folder to capture for each new project, that makes it easier to locate in times like this....

ALSO, I had a bloke from our LA User group call me up.

Paul - I've digitized 9 tapes, and everything was fine. The next day, when I opened the project, video from tape 9 was showing up in a clip on tape 1, and tape 2 rack had video from all over the place and so on and so on, and so on.

After a brief discussion, and investigative work that I learned in the CIA...um, forget I mentioned that.....we determined that "Name Unmentionable" had diged all his tapes with the same reel name....

"Brian you idiot..." Whoops. Forget I mentioned that too... I said "you bonehead," in a term of endearment of course....

Since each of the 9 tapes starts at 00:00:00:00, and goes to about one hour, the only other way Liquid can tell which clip comes from which tape is if you tell it that clip came from Tape 1, 2, 3, 4, - 9....

The only way to salvage the situation was to import each media file into the project. That way Liquid could see that there were 9 1 hour media files, and then referred to them as imported files, and not captured files.....

After that, Dr. Bonehead was smelling like roses....recently fertilized....