[Enrique Acevez]

The first thing to consider is that one thing is a project and another an event, this’s the new way to organize files of final cut, an event is what you would call a Project in old final cut pro, and a project in the new Final Cut X is what you would call a in older versions, so starting from this point if you “Consolidate a project” with the “Consolidate media Project” option what final cut X will do is to make sure that the media (aliases or real media files) used in that project are in the same location, for example, suppose you have 2 events called “Holidays” and “Family” each one on separate hard drives and you have one project called “Family Holidays” linked to the Holidays event, for the project you use clips from both events, so in one project you would have clips from different events in separate hard drives, until now everything is ok, but what happens when you want to back up you project “Family Holidays” well you could manually copy the files from one hard drive to the other, or you could “Consolidate media project”, BUT this one is tricky, lets go back a little, IF in your events you have aliases Final Cut X will consolidate Aliases, if you have the original fils it will consolidate the original file, so what does this means, that final cut will move or copy the aliases or file used in your project from both events to the hard drive where is the event that has linked the project. So at the end you ar just moving file or aliases to one location, this is what “Consolidate media project” do.

The diference to “Organize event files” is that this last option will replace the aliase in you event for the real file in you hard drives.

So if you Consolidate you project but you just use clips from one event or many events in the same hard drive you will get the error “Nothing to Consolidate The selected project and the Events it refers to are already in the same location.”

Final Cut X can work with just the aliases and don’t need to copy files or move the media so you can have al your media in a high-capacity hard drive like a server and you don’t need to full the HD of your computer with tons of videos and several people can use the files from a server for example, and the only thing you need to back up your project is to take al your aliases with you to any where you want, then, put them back in your computer with final cut or any other computer and the alias will still work.

So I hope this clears up a bit your doubts, is really tricky, but when you get to understand it is an easier and automatic way to organize your files.

Hi5 all.