[Joe Marler]

[Andrew Johnstone] “I can’t scrub through clips in the viewer window, the most useful layout is to have the clips as a list, with the long preview window at the top of the list…

FCPX does not require you load one clip at a time into a source monitor to scrub. It uses a different conceptual model. The skimmer lets you rapidly scrub through any clip in the Event Browser. Normally there’s a single viewer which auto-switches between the timeline and Event Browser display, but you can toggle on/off separate displays with CTRL+CMD+3.

In the Event Browser, there are pros and cons to filmstrip mode vs. list mode. Unlike “hover scrub” in Premiere, the FCPX skimmer is extremely high performance and can display the skimmed clips in the viewer. You can use JKL to skim from one clip to the next in filmstrip mode, if View>Browser>Continuous Playback is enabled.

The overall concept is you rapidly skim through clips in the Event Browser, mark favorites, rejects, and keywords — based on *ranges*, not clips, then switch the filter to “Hide Rejected” with CTRL+H. After the prep work, you then (and only then) proceed to the timeline phase of editing. For more details, see “Warp Speed Keywording”: https://www.provideocoalition.com/warp-speed-key-wording-in-final-cut-pro-x/

[Andrew Johnstone] …when you place a clip into the timeline in Premier the rest of the media stays where you want it to stay rather then hopping all over the place and requiring you to make adjustments…

In FCPX you can easily do an overwrite edit by pressing D: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12539?locale=en_US

[Andrew Johnstone] …In FCPX I have yet to find out how to do a simple three point edit…

I frequently do three-point edits in FCPX: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12636?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US

[Andrew Johnstone] …add an audio fade between two clips…The FCPX solution requires, detaching audio and applying a video transition (or one solution is ‘buy a plug in’…..agggggh! Third party/User created plugins…! Don’t get me started!) etc…Now try to relink the audio clip with the video clip…

While FCPX could be improved in this area, you can easily do an audio-only cross fade without using a 3rd-party plugin: https://www.provideocoalition.com/day-7-28daysofquicktips-2018-apply-toggle-audio-fades-final-cut-pro-x/

Re detaching audio, this is often not necessary for things like a split edit:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12635?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US

You can also do dynamic trimming and apply audio-only cross fades without using the mouse, as shown in MacBreak Studio #434:

https://www.provideocoalition.com/mouseless-dynamic-trimming-in-final-cut-pro-x/

[Joe Marler]

[Robin S. Kurz] “I can’t speak to either codec…So not a yardstick that is in anyway relevant to me personally. But again, the video above comes to a very different conclusion, as does this article/video: https://bit.ly/2MkTS5C … though, granted, the version of Premiere is not mentioned (nor that of FCP) in the latter, so it could potentially be the pre-update version. But it is from yesterday…”

It likely applies to almost any Long GOP codec, including AVCHD, Sony XAVC-S, all the variants of H.264, and HEVC. This means almost anything shot with a smart phone, GoPro, any consumer camcorder, most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, etc.

There were two previously-mentioned videos, one by Jason Vong and the other by Max Yuryev. Jason Vong focused almost exclusively on Premiere *playback* performance of 4k Sony XAVC-S. Any comparison to FCPX was incidental and the details were not well documented.

As opposed to 1x speed *playback* performance, editing operations often involve a lot of rapid scrubbing forward and backward on the timeline using JKL or other shuttle commands at 2x, 4x, etc. Those tests are very revealing, but Jason never mentioned doing those.

But he claimed to get better Premiere 1x playback performance after updating to 12.1.2. The release notes do state hardware accelerated *decoding* on MacBook Pro and iMac Pro running High Sierra. That is new.

However I have a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro running Premiere 12.1.2, and I can’t tell any difference. It was sluggish before on 4k H.264 scrubbing, and it’s sluggish now. The same JKL commands on FCPX on the same hardware are much more responsive, but the iMac Pro is less responsive on H.264 than my top-spec 2017 iMac, probably due to AMD’s UVD hardware vs Quick Sync.

Re the H.264 encoding tests Jason and Max did which showed FCPX much faster, Premiere has many encoding options, and it’s easy to pick one (e.g, CBR or VBR 2-pass) that makes export much slower. By contrast for “Master File – Computer”, and probably various other presets, FCPX defaults to VBR 1 pass at a fixed bit rate, about 20 mbps for 1080/29.97 and 30 mbps for UHD 4k/29.97. That is an efficient encoding method which can be hardware accelerated. On Premiere if you pick CBR or VBR 2-pass, it will silently fall back to software-only encoding. It’s possible that’s what happened on the tests by Jason and Max.

When I do Premiere vs FCPX encoding tests, I always pick VBR 1-pass and the bit rate that best matches FCPX. Then I examine the output files with Invisor to ensure the file was encoded as expected. That helps ensure a fair and even test.

I just ran some more tests, this time using a simple 60 sec UHD 4k/29.97 XAVC-S clip. Exporting to UHD 4k/29.97 VBR 1-pass at 30 mbps, here are the results:

2017 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro:
=====================

FCPX 10.4.3: 44.1 sec
Premiere 12.1.2: 34.9 sec

2017 iMac 27, 4.2Ghz i7:
================

FCPX 10.4.3: 40.5 sec
Premiere 12.1.2: 44.1 sec

In Premiere if I encode with different settings than the default used by FCPX “Master File – Computer” default, I get the following times:

Premiere 12.1.2, iMac Pro, CBR 30 mbps: 1:37
Premiere 12.1.2, iMac Pro, VBR 2-pass 30 mbps: 3:12
Premiere 12.1.2, iMac, CBR 30 mbps: 2:54
Premiere 12.1.2, iMac, VBR 2-pass 30 mbps: 5:54

So, you can pick H.264 encoding options that will make Premiere much slower than FCPX. However when using equivalent encoding options, as of 12.1.1 (the early 2018 release) Premiere is essentially as fast on the same hardware as FCPX at H.264 encoding, and even faster in some cases.

Premiere remains much slower than FCPX at *decoding* 4k H.264, and especially at typical JKL scrubbing operations typical of editing. But even FCPX is somewhat laggy at this, despite the iMac Pro’s horsepower. For 4k H.264, I typically must use proxies for fast, fluid editing. When proxies are used, Premiere and FCPX are *both* fast at 4k H.264 timeline operations.

The point is Premiere has generally caught up to FCPX’s H.264 encoding performance, plus added important features like collaborative editing. Similarly, Resolve performance has vastly improved. Apple cannot stand still on either performance or features, but they cannot sacrifice stability. It is difficult to achieve all three of those.

[Joe Marler]

[Sascha Engel] …Where do I check to set Library settings to “Internal”?…And what does it exactly do?…”

In FCPX you click on the library, then at the upper right make sure the Inspector pane is enabled, and there’s a modify button there. CMD+4 shows/hides the Inspector. However this is a complex area. You can easily make a mistake with your data. I recommend you obtain and study closely Ripple Training’s media management tutorial: https://www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cut-pro/media-management-in-final-cut-pro-10-4/

[Sascha Engel] ..Regarding worx4, is it good and reliable software?..

It seems to work well but the current version doesn’t allow trimming multicam clips. Since 50% of everything we shoot is multicam, it’s not useful to us.

[Sascha Engel] If I consolidate to the new created library, will it copy the files in question there or move them? Copying would be what I need, since the files should stay in their original location as well.

It will copy the files. As always when dealing with media management, study the process, go slow, check and double-check, question everything and assume nothing.

[Joe Marler]

[Joe Marler] “Re other issues, for years FCPX was vastly faster than Premiere at exporting to H.264. This performance lead has now evaporated. After seven years of not supporting Quick Sync, Premiere CC on the Mac can export to H.264 as rapidly as FCPX.”

[Robin S. Kurz] Sorry, but that is just plain false.”

Historically FCPX has been much faster than PP, esp. at H.264 playback and encoding. This was due to several factors, but Premiere’s lack of support for Quick Sync (esp. on Mac) was key. In general editing 4k H.264 using Premiere on
even a high-end Mac was very sluggish. In 2016 Premiere introduced proxy support, which makes scrubbing and JKL responsiveness faster, but the issue is how fast is Premiere vs FCPX at 4k H264 without proxies.

You can see some of the earlier tests I’ve posted showing how much faster FCPX was at H264:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/45875

As I described here, the FCPX viewer update rate when scrubbing a 4k H264 timeline was about 10x
faster than Premiere: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/100210

However more recently PP got a lot faster (for exporting) in the 2018 update 12.1.1. It was no faster for
decoding, which means timeline scrubbing was no faster, but export performance was equal to or even faster
in some cases than FCPX on the same hardware. I posted test results here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/101459

Whether the Metal or OCL playback engines were used made no difference.

After I posted those tests, another PP update was recently released, 12.1.2. I just re-tested this on both top-spec 2017 iMac 27and a 10-core Vega64 iMac Pro, using the same Sony Alpha XAVC-S codecs mentioned in the above video.
My documentary team has seven of these cameras including two A7RIIIs, and if all our multicam teams
are active we shoot about 1 terabyte per day, so we deal with a lot of this material.

Playback: Premiere 12.1.2 is no faster than the previous version on a top-spec 2017 iMac or a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro. Playback at 1/4 res of 4k H264 multicam without proxies is extremely laggy and slow. JKL keyboard lag is severe. FCPX 10.4.3 using the same material on the same hardware is a little sluggish but much faster.

On the iMac Pro (which does not have Quick Sync due to Xeon), both FCPX and Premiere are apparently using AMD’s UVD/VCE hardware acceleration. FCPX uses it on both encode and decode side, apparently Premiere only uses VCE which is the encode side. However FCPX is apparently not using hardware acceleration for HEVC 10-bit encoding, so it’s extremely slow.

Exporting: see below results. These tests used a 60 sec multicam clip from two Sony A7RIIIs. Material was XAVC-S, UHD 4k 8-bit 4:2:0, 100 mpbs.

2017 iMac 27, 32GB, 4.2Ghz i7-7700K, RP 580, 2TB SSD, macOS 10.13.6: FCPX 10.4.3, vs Premiere Pro CC 12.1.2:
============================================================================

FCPX: 4k H264 Fast Encode, 30 mbps: 40.4
Premiere: 4k H264 VBR 1 pass, 30 mbps: 41.8

FCPX: 1080p H264 Fast Encode, 20 mbps: 39.4
Premiere: 1080p H264 VBR 1 pass, 20 mbps: 27.6

FCPX: 4k HEVC 8-bit, 16 mbps: 1:25
Premiere: 4k HEVC 8-bit VBR 1 pass, 16mbps: 1:29

FCPX 4k HEVC 10-bit, 18 mbps: 33 minutes
Premiere: 4k HEVC 10-bit VBR 1 pass, 18 mbps: 11:27

2017 iMac Pro, 64GB, 10-core, Vega 64 GPU, 2TB SSD, macOS 10.13.6: FCPX 10.4.3 vs Premiere Pro CC 12.1.2:
==========================================================================

FCPX: 4k H264 Fast Encode, 30 mbps: 47.3
Premiere: 4k H264 VBR 1 pass, 30 mbps: 39.1

FCPX: 1080p H264 Fast Encode, 20 mbps: 28.8
Premiere: 1080p H264 VBR 1 pass, 20 mbps: 24.7

FCPX: 4k HEVC 8-bit, 16 mbps: 44.9
Premiere: 4k HEVC 8-bit VBR 1 pass, 16mbps: 42.3

FCPX 4k HEVC 10-bit, 18 mbps: 24 minutes
Premiere: 4k HEVC 10-bit VBR 1 pass, 18 mbps: 4:12

[Joe Marler]

[Sascha Engel] “The total material of the documentary exceeds 3TB and is
scattered over three disks. Easiest is to do a Consolidation of the entire Library to make sure it’s all in place.
But I do not need the entire 3TB. Only a fraction was used for the 1 Hour Final Cut.”

You just create another library, in Inspector make sure the library properties are set to “Internal”, and drag/drop the project to that library. Only the clips used in the project will be copied. You then do a consolidate.

Entire clips are copied to the new library, not trimmed clips. However that will be much smaller than all your shot media.

To trim clips and leave user-specified handles you’d have to use Worx4 X, however that doesn’t trim multicam clips: https://worx4.com

[Joe Marler]

[Andrew Johnstone] ” The idea that the magnetic timeline works some sort of magic is a nonsense…”

There are pros and cons to it. In the “Off the Tracks” documentary, Apple engineer Dave Cerf (who was a designer of the magnetic timeline and later assisted Walter Murch) described some of the philosophy behind it. I personally think some other features such as the high-performance skimmer, range-based tagging and pervasive database orientation make a bigger difference in overall productivity.

[Andrew Johnstone] … ‘forgetting tracks’ is also nonsense because FCPX uses tracks it just renames them as ‘storylines’.

Storylines and audio lanes are quite different from tracks. If a storyline was simply a track by another name, people wouldn’t have such a difficult time adjusting to FCPX.

[Andrew Johnstone] …64 bit v 32 bit aside, FCPX is not necessarily ‘faster’. There are plenty of people who have cut 1/2hrs for broadcast in a day on all manner of systems including on FCP7…

You can obviously get the job done with any NLE, and the proficiency of the DIT, Asst. Editor and Lead Editor make a big difference. FCPX is very strong at unscripted high-shooting-ratio material like field documentaries. This has little to do with the magnetic timeline but more involves the skimmer and range-based rating and keywording.

[Andrew Johnstone] ….You are up and running on Premier Pro much more quickly than you are on FCPX as you don’t need to wait for the machine to churn to ingest & transcode footage…

I’ve used Premiere since CS4 and have a subscription to CC. FCPX is generally no different regarding performance of ingest using “leave files in place”. It does not require transcoding. You are probably describing ingest with re-wrap which FCPX does by default for certain tree-oriented media formats. Using the right technique, those can usually be imported using “leave files in place”, although there is some variation.

[Andrew Johnstone] ….The biggest beef I have with FCPX so far is how it handles media. I have had to use Edit ready to transcode P2 media to ProRes Quicktime files on my last project…

In most cases you don’t need to transcode to ProRes using EditReady. It can usually just re-wrap (IOW “passthrough” ) the files which is vastly faster. On FCPX 10.4.3, I can directly import 4k MXF files from a Sony PMW-F55 using “leave files in place”, and it works OK. Those can also be re-wrapped via EditReady without transcoding.

It’s a good idea to make sure you’ve installed the latest version of Apple Pro Video Formats: https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1947?locale=en_US

[Andrew Johnstone] …Sharing projects seems problematic… I brought the XML back to my studio and none of my source material would relink to the new XML. The reason? FCPX it seems had created a load of proxy files on the client system (links to ProRes files) that I could not relink on my system…

There are definitely some things you’ll need to learn about FCPX media management. It is not perfect but it’s possible to work collaboratively and lots of people do that. Ripple Training’s media management class covers much of this: https://www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cut-pro/media-management-in-final-cut-pro-10-4/

[Andrew Johnstone] ….Adapting to this system has taken most of the editors i know a huge amount of time….

It can definitely take a while to unlearn past ways of doing things and adapt to the new system. It was difficult for me.

[Andrew Johnstone] …..can the magnetic timeline be turned off?..

It cannot be fully and truly disabled. However some describe the Position Tool as “disabling the magnetic timeline”. This lets you do certain things but the best approach is use this only when it’s unavoidable: https://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video-editing/understanding-the-fcpx-magnetic-timeline/

[Joe Marler]

[Andrew Johnstone] “What i have learned about FCPX is that while it says it can handle any media, it actually can’t and it converts everything into ProRes for the edit. I have tried ‘leaving files in place’ but if the files are inside a Sony Card file format the app won;t have it and they have to be ingested. “

FCPX can handle Sony XAVC-S and many other formats without transcoding. What you’re describing is not conversion to ProRes but re-wrapping and copying to the library or designated media folder. I haven’t throughly tested XAVC-L or XAVC-I, but for XAVC-S, I imported 12 terabytes of documentary content using “leave files in place” without re-wrapping or transcoding. It worked fine.

The problem is you must copy the video files out of the card folder before doing the import. We do that anyway in the field during offloading. We also rename all the files, appending a globally unique serial number.

It is considered poor form to copy the media files out of the folder because of the risk some metadata files might be needed. For AVCHD this should never be done due to an I/O performance issue in FCPX. However with XAVC-S it works fine. For other formats, I don’t know.

[Joe Marler]

Alex implies that Apple needs to support Hollywood-type workflows more directly, but then he says “I am not convinced that the vocal tiny minority in feature films and TV are worth supporting”.

Avid has a near-total lock on Hollywood. Yet the last time I checked, Avid’s stock was near a 25-year low, their revenue from video editing and solutions has declined each year since 2011 and is currently at about $200 million per year. Apple makes more on adapters and watch bands. The “street cred” from Hollywood using Avid near-exclusively may amount to something, but in real-world revenue it’s not much.

Alex then says “The last gap in the Final Cut Pro X feature set is collaboration: where multiple people can work the same media and timelines at the same time”.

I agree with that. However this is technically difficult. It is essentially a multi-user distributed database. Google has this in Google Sheets — each user’s spreadsheet changes are color coded, their change history is tracked, and there’s an integrated chat feature. Google makes this look easy but it’s very difficult to do with near-100% reliability and without an on-premesis server. However that would be much more useful to my team than 360 VR features.

Alex then says “It is likely that over 95% of videos made in the world are made by a single person”. This implies that an investment by Apple in multi-user FCPX technology might be misdirected. But are 95% of videos made by one person because that’s the best workflow or because multi-user collaboration is so difficult and unsupported by current software that only 5% try it? I’ve worked on some small teams where it would be very beneficial to have two geographically-separate assistant editors marking keywords and ratings while a lead editor made an assembly edit. There are 3rd-party workarounds for this using MergeX but it’s tacked-on.

Multi-user video editing collaboration is often discussed solely in the context of a co-located team on a LAN. That’s true for large professional teams but for the more typical (and numerous) smaller FCPX workgroups, they are geographically distributed. Such collaborative editing is generally discussed only regarding the timeline. With FCPX much of the work happens *before* the timeline phase, as media is rated and keyworded in the Event Browser. Geographically distributed, cloud-based collaboration on *that* phase would be useful — and in keeping with FCPX orientation. This might seem difficult but Google has solved it with Google Sheets.

Re other issues, for years FCPX was vastly faster than Premiere at exporting to H.264. This performance lead has now evaporated. After seven years of not supporting Quick Sync, Premiere CC on the Mac can export to H.264 as rapidly as FCPX. At least FCPX still supports it on the decode side, which Premiere hasn’t yet done. Resolve performance seems to be improving month by month. There’s a lesson here — if you stop making rapid advances your competitors (no matter how sluggish) will eventually catch up.

There are websites with huge “grab bag” lists of requested FCPX improvements — color-coded video lanes, etc. I personally would like a auto-scrolling timeline but I can scroll it with my finger. I don’t have good workarounds for the poor management of external proxies, non-existent collaborative features, or nagging UI issues like the timeline jumping when applying color correction.

[Joe Marler]

[Shane Ross] “ANYONE working on a reality TV show needs this. Most people working on TV docs that have a short delivery time so we need more than one editor needs this…It’s a godsend to many of us who have a LOT of footage to deal with, and short deadlines (talking tens of thousands of hours of dailies)….”

Scott may have been thinking exclusively about multiple editors working on the same timeline vs the FCPX approach where much of the work is of an organizational nature in the Event Browser before reaching the timeline. From that perspective, having collaborative features only used by multiple lead editors in the timeline phase of post production could seem a niche application.

If the material is properly prepped by the AE or team of AEs, the lead editor can work much faster, and in fact this AE/LE labor split is virtually required for a high-shooting-ratio production. In my experience working on large documentaries, I’d estimate the overall labor hour investment is probably split 3:1 in favor of the DIT and AE teams vs the lead editor. If you include color and audio finishing, it might be 5:1. So the timeline editing phase (while crucial) is only one stage of post production. The more labor-intensive organizational phase could also benefit if FCPX had better multi-user collaborative features.

Ideally these features would be designed for both decoupled geographically decentralized collaboration and for co-located LAN-connected collaboration. In the FCPX user profile, it’s probably more common for a few decentralized people to be working collaboratively than they be co-located with a gigabit or 10-gig NAS.

If the NLE (inc’l maybe Lightworks) has limited organizational tools except for the timeline, of course editors will think in terms of organizing huge globs of material on a bunch of timelines. Hence when considering multi-editor collaboration, often only multi-user timeline features get discussed.

I don’t know what granularity Lightworks’ collaborative timeline allows, but NLEs that support this typically have a fairly primitive bin-locking or timeline-locking feature. Even this should ideally include NLE features to reflect who has what resource locked and maybe an in-app chat feature, otherwise you constantly must call the other parties to coordinate. As locking becomes finer grained, this improves concurrency but increases complexity to implement and test.

The problem is such features essentially constitute a distributed database, and that’s very difficult to achieve with extreme reliability — especially without a server. The locking or concurrency control system must be rock-solid, else data will be lost or corrupted. This includes proper handling of many different cases: deadlock, livelock, atomicity violations, rollback, lost or stalled connections, etc. These happen under the covers, even if users don’t perceive it.

There’s a compelling need for improved multi-editor collaborative features in the FCPX Event Browser, not just in the timeline phase of editing. However I understand why Apple may not think the development and testing burden of this would benefit a large % of the user base. OTOH I wonder what % of the user base uses 360 VR editing, yet Apple developed that.

[Joe Marler]

[Alex Mallis] “starting a feature doc and am wondering best practice for filing inside fcpx…I’ve read conflicting advice as to whether to use a single event, or an event for each shoot day… I would be pulling clips from different shoot days and so would want keywords that can transcend events. I will likely have a lot of keywords…I’ve read that using a single event can cause the program to slow as the clips increase in volume. Hence my desire to try multiple events…

I’ve edited docs on FCPX using a single event containing 8,000 clips (181 hr of 1080p and 4K material), comprising 4.75 TB total size. The organization was strictly based on keywords and ratings, and it worked fine. I later did one which used 230 TB of 4k H264 spread over about eight events; it also worked mostly OK.

OTOH it is common to use a single event per shooting day. But this isn’t really necessary — if your camera clocks are set correctly the material can be in a single event, grouped by shooting day within FCPX: View>Browser>Group Clips By>Content Created and pick Ascending. With the group you can sort them by date ascending.

Then CMD+OPT+click on the disclosure triangles and they will all collapse or you can individual expand them.

On a physical level, FCPX currently uses a folder within the library for each event. It is theoretically possible future versions of FCPX could maintain the user-facing Event yet use some other database mechanism for physical storage which doesn’t involve a folder on the file system level. Gmail already does this — their “folders” are really just metadata labels.

That said, events can be useful “fences” for segregating material in a collaborative environment. In a large project you could have several events and various assistants could each be working on an assigned event — rating, keywording, etc. The metadata for their work can be transferred via XML. However the 3rd party utility MergeX allows merging metadata from two different versions of one event: https://www.merge.software

MacBreak Studio #223 “Warp Speed Keywording” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJ4J41JaZk

You must also think ahead to how any keywording or rating system will be used during the edit phase. It is tempting to add many keywords which later don’t get used. The FCPX skimmer is so fast you can often just tell by looking what the material is. IOW I don’t need a keyword to tell me obvious things. This video “One Smart Collection to Rule Them All” shows an interesting approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjuCfJFhdo0

OTOH, in doc editing, one of the most time-consuming aspects is matching interview dialog to b-roll. Using range-based keywords to tie together interview dialog and the supporting b-roll can be helpful.

There are two types of b-roll matches often used: a visual match and a dialog match. In a visual match the subject could say something and you want b-roll of them doing that action. Maybe it was shot on a different day or week, so is sorted apart from the interview. An Asst Editor can find that visually and tie them together with a keyword, such as the subject’s name.

The other type is a dialog match where the subject says something you’ll need b-roll for. The reverse is an important b-roll or establishing shot you then need interview dialog to cover. Those are harder since you can’t go through dialog as fast as visual material. If the AE has enough time, it can be useful to use keywords to tie together the dialog range with the b-roll.

In theory Lumberjack Builder software allows text-based video editing using transcribed material: https://www.lumberjacksystem.com/builder.html

Aside from keywords, just doing simple things can make life a lot easier for the final editor (whether that’s you or someone else)

– Reject all junk or obviously unusable material
– Sync all multicams and select the proper audio channels
– Reject all multicam parent clips to avoid accidental keywording or favoriting of them. A MC clip does not inherit ratings or keywords so IMO it’s better to rate/keyword only MC clips, not the parent clips.
– Use favorites but save these as a keyword collection so the final editor can use the favorite system unencumbered. E.g, the AE can mark their own favorites then before handing off to the final editor select them all, mark as a keyword “Tom’s Favs”, then un-favorite the clips.

If your cameras produce duplicate file names (common on many Sony cameras) it’s wise to uniquely rename all files before importing them. In my case I append a unique serial number. This makes handling the files easier in post, and avoids an FCPX bug that creates spurious duplicate clips if importing XML metadata. The 3rd party tool A Better Finder Rename is a powerful, flexible tool with multi-pass renaming: https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/

If your material is 4k H264, then proxies will be needed for optimal editing performance, no matter what kind of Mac you have. If you envision a collaborative proxy-only workflow, this can be somewhat complex. In that case it would be best to obtain and study closely the Ripple Training 10.4 Media Management tutorial: https://www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cut-pro/media-management-in-final-cut-pro-10-4/

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