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One Project – Multiple Clients – How to Manage
I have eight hours of film transfered to Beta SP. The footage belongs to an ad agency (my client) who uses it much like stock footage. The agency sells variations on a concept to multiple end users…their clients. I edit the footage into :30 commercials. In the course of one year we may produce spots for 15 or 20 different end users. I’ve recently migrated to Final Cut Pro and am about to begin the lengthy process of logging and digitizing selects from the eight hours of original film. My question is this:
Is there a way to create separate projects for individual end users but be able to pull footage from a common collection of scenes stored in one place? I’m afraid that, with the inevitable variations and revisions for each individual end user, keeping all of the different clients in one project will get confusing and unwieldy.
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5 Replies
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Rick,
Your instinct is correct. With FCP, unlike AVID, the media can live “outside” any project and be referenced by multiple projects. My suggestion would be to digitize the media into a project called “Media only”, and then anyone who needs it can pull either this project or just the individual clips into their own project. We use this concept on many of the reality shows we do which can have numerous editors all working off of the same media. With some organization in advance, finding all of the media at the Apple finder level is a breeze. In fact, if you just want to browse the footage you don’t even need FCP… just a quicktime player will do.
mark
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Mark thanks so much for the quick response to my question. Being new to FCP I’m not exactly sure how to go about pulling individual clips into different projects from a single “Media Only” file but just knowing that it can be done raises my spirits. I’ll burn a little midnight oil over the instruction books and see if I can’t figure that part out. Again thanks.
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[Rick Macadamia] “I’m not exactly sure how to go about pulling individual clips into different projects from a single “Media Only” file”
After you’ve captured all of the master clips (in a project you call “Media Only”), they will be found in a folder called “Capture Scratch” inside another folder called “Media Only” (called that because that’s what you named this project).
You can just drop this WHOLE “Media Only” FOLDER (actually it will become a sort of “alias” of the “real” folder which will remain where it is on the hard drive) into the Browser window ANY and as many FCP projects (new and old) as you’d like, and all of the clips in this folder will be instantly ready to use.
Example: If I capture running car footage for a car spot I editied in, say January… I can just open the “Capture Scratch” folder, find the name of the January car spot, and drop thesame captured clip(s) of footage into the Browser of a spot I’m editing in July.
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Rick,
I work occasionally at an agency which has a similar library of footage which several people access. It’s all kept in a dedicated drive which is backed up. One key to sanity with this situation is a solid naming scheme used to organize and catalog everything. If you do this properly you will be able to just digitize all of the eight hours by subject or whatever and it will be very easy for anyone to use in as many projects as you want.
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Well FCP blows Avid away on that one. Whatever you name the media will the the name of the media ON the hard drive. You don’t actually need the original project anymore. They’re just QT clips on a hard drive in a file folder named what you named the original project.
On Avid, when we did this kind of thing we created a main project where all was digitized and common sequence and effect elements were kept. We’d then import those bins into whatever current project we were working on. It would be nice if in FCP the bins were separate elements like Avid, but they’re not.
However, you may find it helpful that FCP can open MULTIPLE projects at once. Although I really don’t advise it for beginners or Avid transients. If you do so, open the other project, copy and paste the clips or sequences you need, and immediately close the other project. Otherwise you might just start creating sequences or digitizing media in one project when you thought you were in another. Then, you delete one project or media from a drive, thinking that it’s done, approved, whatever and you don’t realize you just cannibalized another project.
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