Long form media management on FCP X?

[Mark Kenfield]

Hi Guys,

I've just migrated over to Final Cut X from Final Cut Pro 6, and love the magnetic timeline and media scrubbing in the new software. However I'm just about to begin an edit on a feature, and have 144 scenes made up of 3,000 clips in ProRes HQ which amounts to 3TB of data. So it's a pretty hefty project.

Due to the scope of the edit, I want to be certain I've got my media properly sorted right from the beginning - to hopefully avoid any issues with the software cracking under the pressure of such a large edit.

My thinking was the best way to go about this would be to break the edit down into roughly 15 minute blocks, and then combine all of the finalised blocks into a single timeline at the end. Does this work well in Final Cut X? Do I use 'projects' to build the individual blocks? Or do I use 'compound clips' for the blocks?

I'm also wondering if people can recommend some clean and simple methods for media management on large-scale projects like this? I already have the clips sorted into folders that are listed by Scene Numbers. How do I import these folders so that navigating the 144 scenes is clean and simple?

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Mark

[Bill Davis]

Segmenting content is a different process in FCP-X because it's entirely a metadata and referential system.
So you have to think about your storage and access concepts a bit differently.

One key is how much you load into your event library - and when.

It's tempting to try to import literally EVERYTHING and have it on-ine all the time for access, but with as much footage as you have, that will be a processor challenge. Not only will X want to load up everything to let you edit it - it will do it's best to keep everything ATTACHED to your workflow in order to create keyword links to every single part of your timeline, even if you never go near those timeline areas for weeks at a time.

You didn't say how you shot your stuff. Whether it's on cards, or drives or whatever. The point is that originally, your takes weren't massive long things - they were discrete buckets of content.

I find it useful to preserve these "shooting buckets" via disk images or sparse disk bundles where you can store ranges of scenes that you know are going to need to have on-line at the same time for working on various parts of your movie.

Then load and unload those images using a utility like Phil Hodgets Event Manager X - or by only mounting the disk images associated with the area you're working on at one time.

If you really want to work on large swaths of scenes or dailys, take the time to create and store Proxy files. They're significantly smaller and still have excellent editing qualities.

Those are some basics, but it's simply going to take some time to get used to the X workflow, and if this is your beginning, think about it like learning to play the piano. It's going to take time. So try not to get too impatient.

Good luck.

[William Hohauser]

Taking the previous posts suggestions seriously but you can import the folders and FCPX will automatically assign keyword collections to the clips based on the folder they are in, if you have that check box selected on import. This is a big, big help in getting started. You also might find creating compound clips in the event folder for your individual scenes before creating the master project helpful. I am about to embark on a six episode series with the same sort of clip load. I have done the compound clip method for simpler projects and it worked well.

[Mark Kenfield]

Thanks guys, I'll look into all of that.

Cheers

[Steve Benjamin]

You might find this of interest HD Warrior long form project on FCPX