where do you guys digitize footage to?

[Chris Poisson]

Under System Settings, you select the folder to which your capture scratch and render files go, among other things. Most people here keep their projects on their boot drives and all their media and render files on selected folders on the media drives. No one that I know keeps all this stuff in one folder.

Have a wonderful day.

[Shane Ross]

FCP does separate your footage by Project. In the CAPTURE SCRATCH folder, FCP creates subfolders, one for each project. So all the media won’t get mixed up.

But I tend to use a CAPTURE project, capture my footage, then move it to a folder that I make for each project, that contains the Captures, Music, SFX, STILLS…everything for that project.

Shane

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[Matt Callac]

It really depends on your workflow. I don’t move the media. I keep it in the capture scratch in the folder with the project name. then on the media drive I have an images folder, music folder, AE renders folder etc etc.. inside those folders are folders with the project names containing that specific media. That way if I need to gather all of one projects things I can just search for the project name in spotlight and move the media wehre i need it.

-mattyc

[John Knapich]

Like most people we leave our media in the FCP Capture and Render folders on our media Raid.
In addition, we make a project folder on the media raid that contains all our other external files: gfx, music, docs, encodes, FCP back ups, etc.
When we archive a project (just the media from the final timeline) to Blu-ray, we include the project folder.

[Mark Raudonis]

I’m with Shane on this, but we take it even further.

Because we’re dealing with multiple projects, many editors and shared storage, we use “capture projects”, but then move the media BEFORE anyone starts editing to a logical folder structure. We capture local on many different systems, then move global (SAN) into a pre determined folder structure.

Letting FCP do media management will work up to a certain point, but then things just get too complicated to keep everything straight. There’s no “magic” to the capture scratch folder. It’s just FCP’s attempt to help you keep things organized. At a certain point, you’re better off creating your own project organization… especially in a shared storage environment.

Mark

[John Fishback]

We let FCP create the project sub-folders on the capture drive. But, we put folders for music, gfx, etc. inside each project sub- folder. It makes it easy to archive projects as all the media is in one place (except for the renders which we typically don’t archive).

John

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