[Alex Johnson]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the reply. It seems I was confused about the capabilities of FCPX and limitations of card structures and I thought FCPX could directly work from those XMF files and then transcode only the bits I end up using upon export rather than transcoding the entire clips beforehand like how we did with FCP7.

But now I seem to understand the workflow based on the capabilities.

Thanks for the help,

Alex

[Alex Johnson]

Hi Andy,

Thank you very much for the last post. This was extremely helpful and it seems to have answered the questions I was looking for. I’m going to try this workflow now and all the tips that you provided and hopefully everything goes smoothly now.

It seems I was confused about the limitations of card structure and XMF files. I thought that FCPX could directly bring in those xmf files and then transcode only the small clips of video I end up using upon export instead of copying the entire file. But thanks for clarifying that and the need to rewrap those xmf files. And the ability to change the naming of the clips is a huge sigh of relief.

Thanks again for all the help and I will let you know if I come across any other issues.

Cheers,

Alex

[Alex Johnson]

Hi Andy,

Thanks so much for the help. Yeah that seems like the workflow I will have to do. Even for 5D and GoPro, I can’t leave the files in place because of the DCIM card structure, unless I just save them outside the card structure.

Thanks for the advice about footage in card from and backing it up. We have a pretty good archive system here where everything is back up onto an Edit Share backup system and also physically on blu-rays. What we have been doing when we were using FCP7 is that for 5D, XDCAM, and C300 footage, we would just use Log and Transfer and those camera’s FCP plugins to read the cards that were copied onto our media repository on our editshare, and then just capture the footage in ProRes on a Capture Scratch in another shared space. And then for GoPros, 5D that wasn’t in card form, or any other files that weren’t ProRes, we would just use Compression or MPEG stream clip to transcode those and import them into FCP7. And then we wouldn’t worry about the raw footage anymore while editing. Anyways, now as we are slowly beginning to transition to FCPX, I’ve been trying to figure out the best workflow now…So I had thought that one of the best things about FCPX would be that the middle step of transcoding wouldn’t be needed anymore and you could just import any file despite its codec or format directly into FCPX. So not being able to leave the files in place is not ideal, but copying the files will not be a huge issue and just be similar to our older workflow I guess.

But what concerns me now about copying the files is the the naming of the copied files, which FCPX changes. For example, I chose a file to copy and it changed the name from BT0045 to “2013-11-02 06_43_17 (id).mov”. Is this a preference issue where I can choose the copy file to retain the original name of the raw clip or is this something I can’t change? It’s annoying that these copied files won’t be named in numerical order or with a common prefix that indicates the project. At least for the 5D and GoPro footage I can simply just copy those mp4s or movs through finder into where all the footage is being saved and then import and ‘leave those in place’ and then the clips will have the original name.

My last concern is the issue I also mentioned in the previous post about the files going missing directly after importing. Would you happen to know the cause behind that?

Thanks again for all the help.

Cheers,

Alex