[Kenneth Merrill]

Here is my workflow: nearly all of my home video footage is from my iPhone. I plug the iPhone into my iMac via USB cable, and in FCPX I click the Import button (downward arrow on left side of panel); in the import menu, I select my iPhone as the source camera, choose the clips I want to import/download, and I click “Import.” I don’t create any proxies or anything like that. Just straight copying.

Bill Davis wrote: “No matter WHAT you change in X, it’s NOT going to report back upstream and create or change the metadata of the finder clips that it has imported. That’s not how the database in X works.”

This is not true.

Up until May of 2014, ALL of the iPhone video clips I downloaded to my iMac with the workflow I described above had their FILE NAMES changed at the Finder level IN ADDITION to the time/date labels within FCPX itself. It’s true, I’ve never seen any other program behave that way, but FCPX did, and it’s well documented on this very forum. Just search “FCPX file renaming on import” and you will find a fair number of people complaining about Final Cut changing the file names of clips they imported. In fact, in the beginning I think it was the only way FCPX would import… But at some point they altered the software, and now I’m wondering if I can actually have it the other way…

I hope I explained everything sufficiently. I do appreciate any help you guys can offer.

Alternatively, is there a program that would import all the video from my phone and change the file names to the capture date while it’s at it? I love the simplicity of just importing everything into events in FCPX, but having the dates in the file names is just so dang convenient for future remembrance.