Best practice for organizing feature doc

[Scott Witthaus]

Hi Alex –

I am about done with a first cut on a 60 minute doc and here is my workflow (tailored of course to the producer and directors style of work).

There are about 20 interviews each lasting over an hour each. When one is shot, I make a TC burn for the director so he can review and take notes. Each interviewee get’s their own event and in that event lives the TC burn. I agree and wish events could be stored in folders!

Since we make a new version each day we cut, I make an event that has current projects only in it and another for old projects. The current event has the latest cut and all the interview TC projects.

Since this is a historical doc, stills are a huge source of imagery. I usually pre-prep them at the finder level (folders for each topic) and import turning folders into keyword collections. I then ‘favorite’ the best stills for quick recall as needed.

Music has it’s own event (and favorites) as well as any historical video we can find. We are going to audio post, so I am keeping things very clean as far s audio goes. My mix is for approval only.

I am doing the color correction in FCPX and for each major setup (usually an interview) I do a base grade as I come across them and save that base grade as a preset using the person’s name for the title. That way, if I am 40 minutes in I can easily recall the grade on a person from 5 minutes in.

I use “favorite-reject” filtering a lot. So very helpful.

That’s all I can think of now at 6:45am with one cup of coffee. I hope this helps!

Scott Witthaus
Visual Storyteller – FCPX, Premiere
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Oliver Peters]

Check out these user stories, which may be helpful:

https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1895-organising-and-managing-480-hours-of-footage-in-fcpx-editing-one-of-europe-s-major-feature-films-of-2017

https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/2015-cut-with-final-cut-pro-x-second-world-war-epic-movie-unknown-soldier-breaks-finland-box-office-record

https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/2054-cut-with-fcp-x-the-prestigious-period-mystery-thriller-la-peste-surpasses-game-of-thrones-to-become-the-most-watched-television-series-in-spain

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Joe Marler]

[Alex Mallis] “starting a feature doc and am wondering best practice for filing inside fcpx…I’ve read conflicting advice as to whether to use a single event, or an event for each shoot day… I would be pulling clips from different shoot days and so would want keywords that can transcend events. I will likely have a lot of keywords…I’ve read that using a single event can cause the program to slow as the clips increase in volume. Hence my desire to try multiple events…

I’ve edited docs on FCPX using a single event containing 8,000 clips (181 hr of 1080p and 4K material), comprising 4.75 TB total size. The organization was strictly based on keywords and ratings, and it worked fine. I later did one which used 230 TB of 4k H264 spread over about eight events; it also worked mostly OK.

OTOH it is common to use a single event per shooting day. But this isn’t really necessary — if your camera clocks are set correctly the material can be in a single event, grouped by shooting day within FCPX: View>Browser>Group Clips By>Content Created and pick Ascending. With the group you can sort them by date ascending.

Then CMD+OPT+click on the disclosure triangles and they will all collapse or you can individual expand them.

On a physical level, FCPX currently uses a folder within the library for each event. It is theoretically possible future versions of FCPX could maintain the user-facing Event yet use some other database mechanism for physical storage which doesn’t involve a folder on the file system level. Gmail already does this — their “folders” are really just metadata labels.

That said, events can be useful “fences” for segregating material in a collaborative environment. In a large project you could have several events and various assistants could each be working on an assigned event — rating, keywording, etc. The metadata for their work can be transferred via XML. However the 3rd party utility MergeX allows merging metadata from two different versions of one event: https://www.merge.software

MacBreak Studio #223 “Warp Speed Keywording” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJ4J41JaZk

You must also think ahead to how any keywording or rating system will be used during the edit phase. It is tempting to add many keywords which later don’t get used. The FCPX skimmer is so fast you can often just tell by looking what the material is. IOW I don’t need a keyword to tell me obvious things. This video “One Smart Collection to Rule Them All” shows an interesting approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjuCfJFhdo0

OTOH, in doc editing, one of the most time-consuming aspects is matching interview dialog to b-roll. Using range-based keywords to tie together interview dialog and the supporting b-roll can be helpful.

There are two types of b-roll matches often used: a visual match and a dialog match. In a visual match the subject could say something and you want b-roll of them doing that action. Maybe it was shot on a different day or week, so is sorted apart from the interview. An Asst Editor can find that visually and tie them together with a keyword, such as the subject’s name.

The other type is a dialog match where the subject says something you’ll need b-roll for. The reverse is an important b-roll or establishing shot you then need interview dialog to cover. Those are harder since you can’t go through dialog as fast as visual material. If the AE has enough time, it can be useful to use keywords to tie together the dialog range with the b-roll.

In theory Lumberjack Builder software allows text-based video editing using transcribed material: https://www.lumberjacksystem.com/builder.html

Aside from keywords, just doing simple things can make life a lot easier for the final editor (whether that’s you or someone else)

– Reject all junk or obviously unusable material
– Sync all multicams and select the proper audio channels
– Reject all multicam parent clips to avoid accidental keywording or favoriting of them. A MC clip does not inherit ratings or keywords so IMO it’s better to rate/keyword only MC clips, not the parent clips.
– Use favorites but save these as a keyword collection so the final editor can use the favorite system unencumbered. E.g, the AE can mark their own favorites then before handing off to the final editor select them all, mark as a keyword “Tom’s Favs”, then un-favorite the clips.

If your cameras produce duplicate file names (common on many Sony cameras) it’s wise to uniquely rename all files before importing them. In my case I append a unique serial number. This makes handling the files easier in post, and avoids an FCPX bug that creates spurious duplicate clips if importing XML metadata. The 3rd party tool A Better Finder Rename is a powerful, flexible tool with multi-pass renaming: https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/

If your material is 4k H264, then proxies will be needed for optimal editing performance, no matter what kind of Mac you have. If you envision a collaborative proxy-only workflow, this can be somewhat complex. In that case it would be best to obtain and study closely the Ripple Training 10.4 Media Management tutorial: https://www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cut-pro/media-management-in-final-cut-pro-10-4/

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