Best workflow to ingest H.264 & ‘VideoBlocks’ footage… (‘Create optimized’ or ‘proxy media’, or both?)

[T. Payton]

Stephen,

Welcome to FCP X, I think you’ll find it will speed up your workflow considerably. However, you’ll need to probably unlearn most of the workarounds you know of in FCP 7. I would recommend you get some basic training. The FCP X basics at Ripple Training come highly recommended. Larry Jordan also has excellent training and the PeachPit FCPX Books are excellent if you are book guy. I can’t recommend those enough. I’ve been with FCP since 1.0 and had a hard time with FCP X until I got some basic training. Most are less than $100 and if you bill rate is anything like mine, they will be a few dollars very well spent.

I’ll do by best to address your questions.

1. I’d like to keep the “bloat” of duplicates files to a minimum but don’t want regret my choices… so:

Bloat to some is a safety net backup to others. 😉

2. ‘Copy files to Final Cut Events Folder’? (Does it transcode, or just copies clips to ‘events’ folder? How do I tell it where to place that folder?)

This indeed just copies files to the event folder and doesn’t do anything to the media, except for duplicate file names and it will append a incremental number “(fcp 1)” to it. Althought this sounds like a foreign thing coming from FCP 7, frankly I think you’ll find this automatic media organization excellent and a great backup.

It really depends on your workflow how you want to avoid too much duplicated media. At my shop, I put all my fresh media on a “media backup” drive. And then copy from there to FCP X. That way I have two copies of my media if I ever need it, plus I have the benefit of letting FCP X keep everything organized.

WIth that said, you of course don’t need to do it that way and just keep your media wherever you like. If you don’t let FCP X manage your media you can easily change your mind mid project and organize your media files to your event. However, going the other way around is a little tricky, but not impossible.

3. ‘Create proxy media’ [and not copy full sized files if that box is unchecked]. Smaller files, snappier playback? But, when it’s time to render the movie would I need to connect the ‘storage drive’ so it can find the full size files? [Laptop specs listed below.])

Yes Exactly. Proxy is 1/4 res and Faster. In fact when you switch FCP X to proxy you can export using just the proxy media, only when you switch to original or optimized media will it look for that. You bring up an interesting workflow that I have not thought of before, perhaps someone else can comment on it.

4. Check both boxes?

If you have both create optimized and create proxy those will both be created in your event folder. So realize that will add some additional size to your project. However, my workflow is often exactly that when I work with h264 footage on my MacBook Pro 2007.

5. Videoblocks clips are listed (on their site) as “Quicktime Photo-JPEG format”. Do I import these as is, or do I need to convert them for the best quality and performance in FCPX? And to what codec, etc?

Yep. Just bring them in as is, they work great. You will love this. The stuff that could never be played back in FCP 7 is perfectly find in FCP X. PhotoJPEG, Animation Codec, even bizzar flavors of MPEG4. If you find you need a bit more “boost” with those clips (and you might with your lower end GPU) you can always choose to optimize them.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[James Taylor]

For some very basic FCPX training you might try here:

https://www.izzyvideo.com/final-cut-pro-x-tutorial/

These are free. The next logical step would be RippleTraining.

JT