Couldn’t they have automated the projects/events to libraries process?

[Chris Kenny]

[Ron Hurtibise] “Why would knowing which events are associated with which project have to be automagical? In 10.0.9, you click on the project in the project library and the properties box lists the events tied to that project. Is this still true in 10.1 when all projects and events are lumped into one big library?”

Projects had a ‘default event’ but they could include clips from other events. FCP X would know this too (it obviously had to keep track of where clips were located), but it still wouldn’t necessarily know how you wanted things grouped. Basically, libraries are introducing a new conception level of organization, and computers still aren’t very good at ‘concepts’….

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Ron Hurtibise] “OK guys, I watched the first three videos in the Ripple Training package, plus the Working with Libraries video. And I’m still not wrapping my head around it. (I never worked extensively in Legacy, so I’m not familiar with Bins). In 10.1, I get that we’re creating Libraries, ostensibly to serve as holding containers for all elements associated with what we used to call Projects. And we can move those Libraries across drives or store them on network drives to enable shared access. Within those Libraries are Events. Events are created to store distinctive types of clips (Interview A, Interview B, B-roll, Exteriors, Music, Animations, Photos, etc.). Why, then, is it recommended that we locate Projects (or timelines) inside individual Events when Projects typically consist of clips from all of the Events? Why would I want to go into Event folders to access my Projects/Timelines? Shouldn’t Projects be renamed Timelines and placed in a Timeline folder inside a Library, separate from the Events? And shouldn’t Libraries have been called Projects, so that within each “Project” (Library) folder, we would have Timelines and Events?”

It’s not as rigid as this. It’s not “one library per project (actual project, not FCP X sequence), it’s one library per collection of related footage and sequences, which may or may not belong to a single (actual) project — maybe you often share media across (actual) projects, in which case you’d probably want to put all of that media and all of the related sequences into a single library. This is part of why you might want to put sequences into events — if sequence belong to different (actual) projects you wouldn’t just want them all grouped at the top level of the library; it’s useful to have an additional level in the hierarchy there. Of course, you could always manually create a ‘Projects’ event in each library and put all of the projects it contains there — that’s what the automatic upgrading does (since it has no way of knowing, really, what else to do).

Basically, FCP X really doesn’t have a level in its organizational hierarchy that strictly maps to an (actual) project. It’s more flexible than that.

Which means, actually, they should just rename ‘projects’ to ‘sequences’ at this point. The fact that I have to keep putting ‘actual’ in front of ‘project’ in this post demonstrates that the current naming is awkward. It also seems to that now that sequences (‘projects’) live in events, compound clips could be converted into sequences and nested sequence support could be added in some future version, which would also simplify things somewhat.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Bret Williams]

Yes, but why on earth would you want libraries based on the events / projects stored on particular drives? Unless just by chance you organized a clients project(s) – not to be confused with sequence projects, by drive. Personally I have a 8tb raid with current projects, and a slower drive for archives.

There’s no need to do anything to the archived projects. And it was pretty simple to mount the 3 current projects individually with their corresponding events, and create 3 libraries. Then I was able to put the library into a project folderalong with all the other assets like scripts, psds, AE files, music, camera originals, etc.