how big is too big for libraries and events

[Bill Davis]

I’ve seen no evidence that the size of a library has any negative effects on performance.

Since Libraries are self contained, and since to copy an asset from one library to another requires duplication – it seems smarter to keep the entire movie in a single Library.

The things that seem to dome up most often that slow X down are A – trying to work with non-supported, non-transcoded or non optimized Original media as your base editing format – (particularly long-GOP variants) that X has to transcode on the fly to work with. And B – over-use of certain third party plug-ins for global stuff like noise reduction or project wide color effects.

On the transcoding stuff, remember X references pools of footage and can switch its pointers simply and easily. So if you import in whatever Native Format you shoot in, but Optimize to ProRes and also let X calculate Proxy media, you can have thinner versions of the footage to allow you to work fast and efficiently – then simply export your final in the highest possible resolution by having X reference the original footage for your High Rez Masters.

There’s almost no reason to try to edit with live huge media files.

FWIW.

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[Ronny Courtens]

As Bill says: import everything into one single Library. There is no documented maximum size for a Library, we have worked with HUGE ones.

For a feature film project there are many ways you can organize your clips. Some time ago Sam Mestman published a detailed description on how he had organized footage for a movie project. Maybe this can be useful: https://www.moviemaker.com/diy/movies-better-fcp-x-red-feature-film-workflow-part-1/

– Ronny

[Craig Alan]

Thanks Bill and Ronny. I took your advice and imported everything so far into one library. I created a new event for each day of production. I see advantage and disadvantages to this approach but for now I’ll have to learn by doing since I’ve never handled a project with this much media.

During one import FC crashed and the media was gone within the event that was created during that session. In the finder the library did show the clips as links (I am keeping the original media, FC Backups, Render files outside the library) but was not showing in FC. The media card copies were also still in the the finder. I tried trashing FC preferences and rebooting FC but the media in that one event was still gone. I reimported the media into that event and I don’t see any problems but that was kinda strange behavior and I’ve never had that happen before. No off line messages or missing links … just an empty event that had clips before the crash.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.