Archiving Media?

[Jeff Kirkland]

Going to a camera archive? No. That’s literally just a copy of whatever’s on your camera card.

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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Noah Kadner]

I usually just buy cheap drives. 1 TB is dirt cheap these days.

Noah

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[Sam Lee]

The time it takes you to do this will exceed the storage space cost. 12-14 Gb capacity hdd will be out in a few months. 8 Tb are now within $180 range. I got mine about $150 on last month’s Black Friday for a 8 Tb hdd from Seagate. Unless you’re shooting all in cinema raw with very large file size or high 240 fps, I don’t see any real measurable benefits.

[Ray Sherman]

Thanks to all for the great tips and advice. I do realize that archiving from a SD card is bit for bit keeping the entire folder intact. I’m archiving simply for having a backup of my original media and for pointing at it for editing. I simply wanted to delete some clips as needed within the archive process instead of doing it in camera first. I now realize that deleting clips during archiving isn’t possible within FCPX unless a Library is used. I’m not ready to start editing at this time, I just want to dump my media for now. I always back up to external drive/s and never on the OS drive. I keep my OS drive for software, plugins, etc., never media. I plan on using a Pegasus thunderbolt 3 in either a 6 or 8 drive array in RAID 5. Thanks again for all your help. Ray

[Fred Turner]

You can make and use new FCP libraries specifically for these SD card archives. There’s not a whole lot of difference between FCPX’s media archive and clips in an event inside a library. Just go to the library or archive in the Finder, right-click, and choose to view the package contents. I was going to try using archives, but for the very reason you are asking your question, I started manually archiving event folders from libraries myself. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

1. Connect up the source (usually in my case, a Sony AVCHD camcorder)
2. Select a range of clips from a particular activity/project (lots of kid/family stuff for me)
3. Import into a new event, named something like “2016.10.28 Jason Football vs. Grayson”
4. View the clips as a list, going through each one and deleting the ones I didn’t want to archive
5. After culling, go to the Library in the Finder, then “view package contents”
6. Grab the folder “2016.10.28 Jason Football…” and copy it to where I wanted to archive
7. Later, if I want to import this stuff and actually edit it, I point FCPX to the folder on my archive drive and import again

HTH,
Fred

[Ray Sherman]

Thanks Fred!! What a great work around! I copied your process and will use it. Also, thanks to all of you for helping out this newbe. I sincerely appreciate it. Ray