Question / Workflow

[Jeremy Garchow]

If you use fcpx to dupe your event to another hard drive, it will automatically bring the media in to your Event.

No reason to also drag the media.

For Projects, you should duplicate Project only, move it in fcpx to the destination drive, and then “modify event references” to your external drive.

Transcoding media should have nothing to do with this.

In this case, there should be no reason to use the Finder.

[Jeff Kirkland]

FCPX is a database driven application. The secret to happy media management is to do as much of it as humanly possible inside of the application itself. The app doesn’t cope well if you end up with multiple events or projects with the same internal database ids, which is what will happen if you use the finder to make the duplicate.

For what it’s worth my current workflow tends to be…

I create a Camera Archive of the original media on an external drive. I used to do this by hand with various apps but since 10.0.6, I can mostly do it within FCPX.

I import media to an event on my working drive, copying the original media to the event. I figure I can’t have too many copies of the original media at this stage. If I need to, I get FCPX to either optimise the media or create proxy media depending on whether I’m going to be working on my Mac Pro or making do on my 13″ Macbook Pro.

I don’t really need to copy or move anything after that. If the project needs to be portable, I’ve already created everything on the external drive I’ll be using for the life of the edit. Maybe I’ll duplicate or move the projects and events over to my Mac Pro if I get to the point I don’t need portability any more.

At the end of the edit I consolidate all the media, then to save space I delete all the render files, and in the Finder manually delete any optimised or proxy media (I have the originals in the event so I can always recreate the optimised media another day) and move the project to external offline storage.

That last step is usually done to a sparse image for easier management as I have to push it across the network to a Drobo for final storage. For convenience, I usually copy all the client documents and images and anything else related to the project into the sparse bundle as well.

Cheers,
Jeff K

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Brandon Parigo]

I work pretty much in finder. FCPX I’m sure is powerful when it comes to organization but every time I do much of it I run into problems.

I copy all files from camera into an external work HD (then back up manually to my drive rack). Once that is done I create an event within FCPX but I create the event on the work drive that houses the media. When I create a project I also create that on the same drive. Doing this allows me to just unplug the drive and move the whole project to another computer to work on. Have had no problems with this set up.

For back up purposes I do duplicate projects inside FCPX but not the media/proxies/or whatever.

I also create ‘silent’ project and event folders on those drives and I manually move project and events into those folders to stop FCPX from seeing them. I have heard that this could cause errors but nothing has popped up for me yet.

If I need to move the project/event/files to another drive I just do so in finder and then relink in FCPX. That sometimes is a pain but it has worked ever since they introduced relinking.

My way of doing it is very barbarian and untrusting of FCPX but it is what has developed naturally for me.

[Jeff Kirkland]

I should add that I’m having to revisit the my workflow slightly because things didn’t work the way I expected when archiving a project yesterday. I ended up with some media not being organised and some unwanted media copied to my event from other events.

I haven’t looked into it properly yet but I think it’s a result of how compound clips work since 10.0.6. I have to figure out if I had problems because of how I organised things during the edit or there’s a problem organising or consolidating media when you have a compound clip residing in another event. Anyway, I think I see some testing and maybe another thread here in my future.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland