[David Burch]

I tried both of those things. No luck 🙁 Is there something I’m missing maybe in the uninstall process? I just placed the app in the trash…

[David Burch]

One thing I’ve noticed about the new FCP is that it wants you to do all your media management within the program. The way I organize by client is simply to create a new event for each client; that way I don’t have to display the clips from other clients when working on one. If ever there is a client with such sensitive data that I don’t even want other clients seeing the name of the event, I’ll dedicate a hard drive to that client (not uncommon in my workflow anyway, given the large amount of storage needed for some of them). However, I have yet to have a client that was that concerned about confidentiality. Even ones with NDAs surrounding our work don’t really care about the name of the project (although naming it by the client and not the project itself would be another way to get around this).

Anyway, where I was going with all that is that I’ve stopped worrying so much about how the media is organized on the drive. I still create client folders, but mainly to house graphics files (.psd, .ae, etc.) and other resources that may not be directly used within FCP.

Of course, you could always house your footage in nested folders and simply have links to it in your event.

[David Burch]

One thing you might try for relinking is the “Modify Event References” button on the inspector when in the project library. I’m not sure if it will relink files with modified meta data, but I know it worked for me when I moved a project from one computer to another. I have a company logo that I use on nearly all my projects that generally resides on the internal drive in whatever computer I’m using, and as such have multiple copies on a couple of different computers (all the same filename). When I transferred my project which had its event on an external drive to a different computer, it naturally didn’t have a link to my logo files on the other computer. An exclamation mark showed up on the project, which when clicked took me to the inspector. I clicked on “Modify Event References”, and it showed me that it had found the missing files on my second computer drive. I clicked OK and it relinked them just fine.

[David Burch]

My guess is that the 4GB file size limit is the reason. Video files can easily grow much larger than 4GB, and because of this FAT32 would pose a serious problem for an event, even if your individual clips are small in size. Render files also go into the event, and a longer project made up of small clips can have large render files.

[David Burch]

Actually, I mix down 2 hour+ tracks in logic all the time, anywhere from 6 to 20 tracks. The first thing it does is analyze the waveforms, which takes about 5-10 minutes, tops. After that I have never experienced any slowdown with re-drawing waveforms.

I understand that it isn’t going to be instantaneous. However, when FCP7 was rendering waveforms much faster than FCPX, there seems to me to be a problem.

I just set up a 2-disc raid 0 that I benchmarked to nearly 300 MB/s read/write…I’ll give that a shot and see how it does. Before I was using single drives over esata that benched about 80-90 MB/s. Not screaming fast, but should be fast enough for most work.

One other thing, I have noticed a big difference between waveforms that are read from aiff files and those red from the audio embedded in ProRes media. The embedded audio seems to take much longer, while the standalone files read much faster. I suppose that’s to be expected.

[David Burch]

Why not place your two music clips in a secondary timeline? Or make a gap clip your primary? Presumedly, if you’re editing a television spot that had to be a specific length, you’d want a gap as your primary anyway. Then, if you have elements such as music that must occur at specific times, simply make them into a compound clip with your primary and none of your other edits would affect them. This isn’t a “workaround”; it’s an entirely new paradigm of editing.

[David Burch]

You make it sound as if keywording were altogether more complicated than favorites to implement. They’re really not. Setting a favorite is a matter of hitting “f”; setting a keyword is as simple as hitting ctrl+1 (or any number through 9, depending on which it’s store in). You may not need to overlap segments, but keywords really are much better designed for saving in and out points than favorites are. Just my 2 cents.

[David Burch]

Agreed, although it does irk me a bit that Apple touted FCPX as a $300 piece of software, when you need to plop down another $100 for motion and compressor to make it fully functional (relatively speaking). They could at least have bundled compressor with it. Motion for $50 does seem like a steal, on the other hand.

[David Burch]

If you’re lining up markers to the audio, you might want to make your audio and primary timeline a compound clip before continuing on with your project. That will lock it in and protect it from anything your other edits do to it. The magnetic timeline can have some unexpected results if you try to use it like tracks.

[David Burch]

The advantage of using keywords over favorites is that you can only have a given range favorited once, while you can apply as many keywords to it as you want.

For example, let’s say you had a 2 minute segment of an interview that you wanted to save for later, but you also had a couple of sound bytes within that 2 minutes you wanted to use for a promotional piece (or another work entirely). You could favorite the 2 minute range, but then you wouldn’t be able to favorite the smaller sound bytes within it because they are already part of the “favorite” range.

Keywords don’t have this limitation. You can keyword the 2 minute range, and then go in and add the same keyword if you want to the sound bytes (say, “edits”). Not only that, you can apply multiple keywords to the same range. So, besides tagging your sound bytes as simply “edits”, you could also call them “bytes”, and you would have two keyword “bins” show up, one with all your “edits” segments and the other with “bytes”. You can even apply boolean operators to keywords in keyword collection.

What you are trying to accomplish is exactly what keywords are designed to do. The favorite tool, on the other hand, is a bit more of a blunt instrument. It’s designed as nothing more than a simple rating system, to balance out the “rejected” button.

If you like the fact that favorites can be applied simply by hitting “f”, simply assign commonly-used keywords to hotkeys. The first 9 use are automatically assigned to ctrl+1-9, and you can easily modify what these keystrokes do. You can even have a keystroke apply multiple keywords if you wish.

I hope that helps. It took me a second to wrap my head around the new paradigm, but after using it I can say that it’s really quite powerful. Keywords are one of the features Apple did right with FCPX, IMO (and if you look at my history right of posts right after it released you’ll see that I’m no fanboy…I was just as furious as everyone else about what they did and still am about some things).