Creating Events

[Kevin Patrick]

[Jason Smith] “ingesting footage, logging material, creating keywords, favorites, etc. I’m wondering is there any reason not to ingest all of my footage as one event? I would think that would create ease for the keywords. Is there a limit to how much material a single event can contain”

I’m not sure what FCP X’s limits are, but I have a project that consists of:

One Event
1,965 items in the Event
1,881 clips in the Event
61 Keywords
23 Projects (used as Sequences)

All the clips are XDCAM EX files. I used Sony’s XDCAM Browser to copy the clips off the memory cards to my computer and XDCAM Transfer to re-wrap the files to *.mov. Then I simply imported the files into FCP X. All of the media is referenced, nothing is copied or moved to the FCP X Event folder.

I used Keywords to organize everything. I have only one folder to hold all the media in 8 different Keyword Collections. I sort of used these 8 Keywords like 8 Events. At first I considered creating 8 different events. But, I decided to use 8 Keywords instead of 8 unique Events.

I would select the appropriate clips and assign one of the 8 Keywords to them. I dropped them all into a single folder. Then, I would scrub through all the clips assigning additional Keywords as I went. This is where all the organization of Keywords really worked great, since I could then further filter any other keyword set by entering one of the main 8 Keywords into the Event Browser’s search field. (I realize this either makes sense, or I’m doing such a poor job explaining what I did, it makes no sense at all)

The use of Keywords was great for organizing. I don’t think there would have been any advantage to having more than one Event. In fact, I think it would have made things more complicated. I probably would have wound up combining Events. Plus, when I launch FCP X, it loads the single Event and all the necessary media is there for any of the various Projects I was working on. This entire “project” was broken down into 23 actual FCP X Projects.

I never used Favorites. Not really sure why though. I found Keywords to work fine. Occasionally I had Keywords overlapping in a clip, which you can’t do with Favorites.

Scrubbing through all these clips and assigning Keywords was very fast and efficient. No dragging and dropping. Skim through a clip, mark In/Out and assign one or more Keywords, FCP X drops each In/Out reference into the appropriate Keyword Collection.

[Jason Smith]

Many thanks. Questions:
1. How did you ingest without creating an event?
2. Why did you do this?

[Kevin Patrick]

[Jason Smith] ” How did you ingest without creating an event?”

Sorry, guess I wasn’t clear enough.

I do have one, single Event. I did all my work on this one Event. All the clips were imported, as files, into this Event. Then I used Keywords to organize everything.

Since all the medias was going to be used for a single output, I didn’t see a need to use more than one Event.

[Jason Smith]

Many thanks, Kevin! If you have any other ingesting/organizing tips for clips, I’m all ears. Again, thanks!