Missing Final Cut Pro X plugins when moving projects between Macs?

Andreas Kiel, the XML expert who makes many useful film production tools has written a useful primer on Final Cut Pro X plugin locations.

Read this as a first step in understanding why even though you have two Macs with the same plugins installed, when you move a project from one computer to another you sometimes get the following image in your viewer:

The plugin is on both Macs – what’s the problem?

Part of the problem is that even though a plugin appears in the browser of both installations of Final Cut Pro X, if it isn’t in the same place on the hard drive, Final Cut won’t recognise a reference to a plugin saved on Mac A when opened on Mac B. As well as there being more than one place you can install plugins, the folder names that appear in the Finder may be different from the actual names of the folders. Projects use the real names of the folders – not the ones that appear in the Finder.

That means that even if exactly the same “My Cool Plugin” effect is stored in a different folder on Mac B, the fact that the Final Cut Pro project from Mac A is looking for it in the original folder will mean the effect will seem to be missing from the copy of Final Cut Pro running on Mac B. This seems very odd when you can see “My Cool Plugin” appearing in exactly the same place in the effects browser in Final Cut on both Macs.

Investigate the XML version of your project

Andreas says

XML can help a lot: template syncing.

You can create a XML. All assets and effects will be listed in the “resource” part of the XML. So you can open the XML in TextWrangler (or something similar) and find the “effect” entries and their paths (uids) manually. This is both time consuming, boring and not effective.

That’s why I made my X-FX Handler some time ago.

X-FX Handler shows listings of the plugins a Final Cut Pro X project uses. The X-FX Handler PDF includes a download link to the application installer.

Visit Andreas’ post on fcp.co to learn more about Motion templates (the way effect, title, transition and generator plugins are made available in Final Cut Pro X).