Importing Footage & Media Management in Final Cut Pro X

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Created on Monday, 25 July 2011 02:50

Importing and media management in FCP X is a good example of an area in which the new version of Final Cut is much better than previous versions. I'm not going to explain in this posthow to import footage (you can find that information in the Help menu and many places online), but rather how media is managed on import and afterwards, why the way FCP X manages your media is great, and what it means for best practices in organizing your projects both inside the program and on the hard drive.

If you've come from Final Cut 7, you know that one of its serious weaknesses is that it leaves you to organize media on the hard drive yourself. FCP 7 does not manage your media; on "import" it simply creates links between clips and your media wherever the media lives. If you have a music file on your desktop, it links to it there. If you have video on a hard drive it links to it there. The problem is that if you delete the music, or move the video, those links are broken and finding and reconnecting them is difficult and at times impossible.

To make matters worse you also have to tell Final Cut 7 where to put render files, the media created when effects or transitions are added to a clip. Often people will point to one location and then later to another. Or if a hard drive with media is unmounted, the program asks for a new location or defaults to your main hard drive. Once again, media proliferates.

To help with this problem, for Final Cut 7 I created a procedure for best practices that has to be learned and applied rigorously. The time it takes to teach it and the time it takes students to learn it is time taken away from learning how to edit and how to be creative in Final Cut.

To my delight, Final Cut Pro X incorporates those best practices almost exactly -- and automatically. Better, it functions as a media manager, allowing you to affect the location of media and the names of folders containing the media from within Final Cut. This is important to understand -- especially if you are coming from Final Cut Pro 7.

Let me give an example. If you change the name of your Event inside FCP X, it changes the name of the Event Folder on the hard drive. What's even cooler is that when you are creating "projects" (timelines) in the project library, if you put them in a folder and name that folder, then those "projects" (timelines) get placed in a folder of that name inside the Final Cut Projects folder on the hard drive. In Final Cut 7, if you changed the name of a bin (a folder), it had zero affect on folders on the hard drive.

So one immediate practical recommendation I can make is that you create a folder in your Project Library that has same name as your Event, and place all of the "projects" (timelines) for the Event you are working on in there. This will create a clear relationship on the hard drive, which you can see in the Finder. The Event media and metadata in the "Final Cut Events Folder" and the folder holding the associated "projects" (timelines) in the "Final Cut Projects" folder will share the same name. The value of this is that when you want to archive this material later, you'll know what goes with what and be able to consolidate it to a new location (which pulls it out of Final Cut X because the program will no longer "see" it).

I've gotten ahead of myself with this recommendation, but I wanted to give an initial, practical example of how knowing how FCP X works can give us a road map to best practices.

You may have noticed that I am using quotes around the word "project." This is what FCP X calls what used to be called sequences. I'm sure Apple had its reasons, but it's an unfortunate use of nomenclature. The problem is that the word is best used to describe a project as a whole; it's also a problem because it seems to imply that you can have only one "project" for each Event. Which is not true. You can duplicate "projects" (timelines), and create sub "projects" which you can later combine, etc. All the things you could do in Final Cut 7 in this regard you can do in FCP X. But the nomenclature is a mess.

My solution moving forward will be to refer to what Apple calls "projects" as "timelines" whenever possible. When I must refer to them as "Projects" I will use a capital "P", such as in "Project Library." "Timeline" is a term that continues to be used in Final Cut Pro X, for example in the help menu, so we're consistent with the nomenclature in that way. "Sequences" is dead; long live "timelines." I will also use the word "Events" for, well, Events in the Event Library. And I will use "project" (lower case) to refer to the totality of what you are working on. Geeze Apple, was this really necessary?

Not only does FCP X manage media for you from within the program, it does so at a level that makes sense. If you know Avid, you know that that program takes full control of all your media and buries it in a file system of its own creation that the user has zero access to. What's awesome about Final Cut X is that it takes over enough to make the process idiot proof, but not so much that you can't get in there and move stuff around when it makes sense to do so; in particular when you want to archive.

Here's how they make it idiot proof. On import you choose which hard drive you want to store your media on. It then controls where on the hard drive everything goes and gives you zero option to change that. It creates two folders and places them in your Movies folder on your main drive, if that's the drive you choose, or it puts them on the root of any other drive you choose. These two folders are: 1) "Final Cut Pro Events" (which holds the media, metadata info, such as keywords you've created, and render files); and 2) "Final Cut Pro Projects" (where the timeline data -- all your edit choices -- goes).

People are complaining about this lack of flexibility, but this was the right choice (and one thatwas borrowed from Avid). This way you always know where everything is all the time.

As a media manager, Final Cut Pro X will allow you to copy or move an Event or a folder containing your timelines to a different hard drive from inside the program. Again, a great level of control for the user. You can choose to see Events and timelines inside FCP X by the hard drive they are located on, so you can easily copy or move from one to another.

Finally, when you want to keep an Event and the timelines associated with that event from appearing inside Final Cut X, either because it's creating excessive clutter or because you're done working on it, all you need to do is to go to the hard drive outside of Final Cut and move the Event and the folder holding timelines associated with that Event, to any other folder. That Event and those timelines will then become invisible to the program and disappear from the Event Library and the Project Library. Put them back at any time and they will reappear.

Given all this, in summary I make the following recommendations:

1) Chose a hard drive that's not your main hard drive to store both your Event (which lives in the Final Cut Events folder) and its associated timelines (which live in the Final Cut Projects Folder). This will allow the hard drives to maximize their individual tasks: one to run the program, the other to access the media.

2) Let FCP X do all the media management for you while you work. Stay out of the folders on the hard drive. (though if you were to move FCP folders from one drive to another yourself, and put them in the right place, it will work; but why risk making a mistake?).

3) Inside Final Cut Pro X, create a folder in the Project Library that matches the name of the Event and keep all timelines that you are working on in that folder. It's okay to create subfolders in there too (such as "Finished Timelines" -- always a good practice.)

4) Only go into the FCP X folders when you are ready to archive a finished project or want to temporarily make them invisible to the program by moving them out of FCP's default folders.

There are more best practices around media management we can discuss, such whether or not to copy original media into an Event, when and why to duplicate timelines, how to avoid the duplication of render files when you do (to save on disk space), and optimal methods for backing up and archiving your projects. If you take my classes, or sign up for tutoring sessions, we will cover these topics and many others.

In my next post I will discuss reviewing and organizing footage in Final Cut Pro X, an area where the software really shines.