Leave files in place

[Jeff Kirkland]

You’ll be getting that message because the files are in a format that fcpx has to transcode or rewrap in order to use so you’ll need to make a copy of the files no matter what but, depending on the source format, fcpx will more likely just rewrap them than transcode them to ProRes. The setting you mentioned is the format for its render files and optimised media files rather than imported files.

You can choose the destination of the copied files by setting it up as an unmanaged library with the media folder set to be on your external drive.

Having said that, I usually use EditReady to transcode or rewrap the files to a new folder, then import the new files rather than getting fcpx to do it. I just like to have a little more control over the folder structure and file naming, etc.

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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Joe Marler]

[Jeff Kirkland] “I usually use EditReady to transcode or rewrap the files to a new folder, then import the new files rather than getting fcpx to do it.”

I strongly agree with this. Re-wrapping (not transcoding) with EditReady is very fast. Importing the resultant files with “leave files in place” is super fast. It avoids issues with bloating the library and possible problems with aborted ingest which leaves camera icons on some clips. That problem is so frequent I see it reported on various forums about every other day.

With some codecs such as Sony XAVC-S you can get away with copying the .mp4 files out of the tree and importing with “leave files in place”. We know from experience this works OK with FCPX (at least current versions).

However this is generally poor practice because the files are not re-wrapped and for some codecs the behavior can be adverse. E.g, doing that with AVCHD can cause major performance problems. Other codecs might need metadata info about clip spanning, color profile, etc. EditReady folds all this into the re-wrapped file.