system resources: projects vs events

[Charlie Austin]

[Philip Fass] “Which is more likely to bog down FCP X:”

I’d say 2. I often have tons of projects open, but on;y a couple events. Don’t see much, if any, bogging down…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Ronny Courtens]

Agreed.

[Nikolas Bäurle]

Generally you should keep events to a minimum. Having footage spread over too many events will become a hassle once you need to archive and off/online projects.

[Bret Williams]

When you archive, you can simply consolidate to one event. If it helps with organization, then multiple events is a fine way to go.

I haven’t found a problem with the number of event, just the number of clips. Of course the more events the more media loaded up into ram.

Also it seems ok until you actually load up an event. IOW click on it and force X to create waveforms and thumbnails. Seems like events are pretty much idle until then. Maybe some basic database gets loaded, but not the ram hog resources.

It’s possible that running your event in filmstrip mode may also hog up a lot of resources. I run mine in single thumnail mode or list view.

[Philip Fass]

I keep my events in list view, but if I have a project with, for example, 10 interviews and 15 location scenes, I’ll have 15 events and 15 projects, until I create one master project. How do you keep everything available and visible without loading down the system? All 10 interviews combined into one event?

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would also agree.

When does circle get the square?

[Bret Williams]

I think the point everyone is trying to make, is that the less you burden FCP X, the better the performance you’ll get. So if you have 15 events and projects, perhaps you only need 1 particular event loaded to work on 1 particular project. If you don’t need all the events / projects loaded, don’t. Until you do need them to combine them all into the one big master at the end. Since X gets bogged down the longer you use it (seems like memory leak/creep of some sort) then loading it up and putting together the final project wouldn’t be very taxing. I have a little widget called istat pro that I check often if X starts acting wonky. Very often X has sucked up all my RAM. Sometimes with little open. Usually some plugin at blame for something complex.

Event Manager X is a great little app for $10 that will allow you to turn on and off events and projects.

[Nikolas Bäurle]

I agree. But for most productions I prefer keeping one event, not for performance, simply to keep my event library simple.

When I started out at Promiflash and we were still figuring things out we had the problem of too many events. At first producers would create one event per shoot, for a daily production with two shoots per day thats 60 events per month and 30 Projects. It didn’t affect performance too much, but beach balling happened more often as far as I remember. Keeping our producers organized with that many events didn’t work well, too often footage was imported into the wrong event, which happens very easily when you have long event lists and hectic producers.

Once we started doing one event per week, so 30 Projects referencing 4 Events, organizing our footage became a lot less convoluted.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Philip Fass] “All 10 interviews combined into one event?
“

Yes. Use keyword collections to group footage. You can also group footage by date/time in the Event if that’s easier.

If you think of Events as fcp7 projects, you probably wouldn’t put one interview in each of ten different fcp7 projects, or maybe you would, I don’t know. I wouldn’t, just as I would put 10 interviews in one Event in fcpx.