How to work a FC project on an Imac and MBP?

[Tim Kay]

Hi guys,

Very excited as i'm going to buy my first Macbook Pro. Was debating long and hard about getting a used one but with the new upgrades and high resale value, decided to splurge and get a new one. So here my question for the forum.

I edit on my Imac (although the MBP will be faster! ) and wondered whats the best way to transfer my work over to the MBP so I can go to my client location and show changes and also show all the unused footage, go over it. Then transferring all the changes made that day back to my Imac timeline.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Simple: organisation!

Just organise all your footage, graphics you might use, music, your scratch disk, your render files, ... within one big folder (and organised subfolders of course).
That way, if you move the folder, FCP should be able to find everything back and you won't have any 'media offline' problems.

[William Hohauser]

Here's a not so compact and slightly dangerous method: Put everything including the FCP project file on an external drive and edit from there, you will never have a problem with unlinked files or mixed up versions floating around. Problems with this method: The best external drives need AC adapters so it's one more plug you have to deal with, bus-powered drives are usually slower drives and all USB drives are out of the question. Also an external drive is more likely to get damaged by accident so a regular (even daily) back plan is called for. After all the media is captured this usually only requires backing up the project file which is a small file and will take a few seconds.