Transcoded Media Larger Than Orginal

Hello to all, and I apologize but I am and absolute noob at Final Cut.

I also apologize if this is mentioned somewhere else but I searched and didn't find and now I'm pressed for time...

I am up to 3 projects now, going up that learning curve. One thing I have noticed though is that my transcoded media is substantially larger than my original clips, which lead me to fill up a 500Gb drive in 2 hours of video!

For instance, a clip from my camera will be 8 Gb, the transcode will be 232 Gb! Is this normal?! I thought it was supposed to do the opposite actually...

I work on FCPX 10.0.5, and the cameras are Sony AVCHD and some other sources once in a while.

Thanks in advance!

You camera shoots in a compressed MPEG4 codec. It's nice because it has small file-sizes, but it's often horror for NLE's and finishing applications, because it can be heavy on the processor, and it doesn't provide good quality for going trough color correction.

You have 2 types of transcoded media in FCP X:
Prores 422 (Optimized Media): This is one of Apple's finishing codecs. It's pretty light on the processor, has good quality even after many generations, and can take some heavy color correction without losing quality. It can be up to 80GB's or something, an hour, you should check Apple's link below for the specifics. Yes, that's an enormous amount, and for some types of work it's too much in filesize.
But it gives you a good codec for finishing, which your AVCHD isn't (after applying effects, color correction, etc.)
Apple also has Prores LT, it's a version of Prores that's a bit smaller filesizes than normal Prores, but unfortunately it's not a transcode option within FCP X at the moment.

Proxy Media: this is a 'light' version of Prores. It isn't meant for finishing or color correction, and quality isn't that great. Filesizes are much smaller then normal Prores (but they will still be bigger then your mpeg4, probably - again, check the whitepaper below from Apple for specifics), but it's more meant if your computer is to slow for editing the Mpeg4 from your camera in real time, or if you are working with multiple streams at the same time (multicam).

If you don't do heavy color correction, and/or your computer has no problem working with the native AVCHD files from the camera, AND the filesizes of Prores are killing you, you can always choose NOT to transcode and just try to work with the native media of your camera.
(FCP X does support native AVCHD, doesn't it? I'm not completely sure, but I thought it did)


Here, there is a white paper from Apple about Prores, which can help you:
images.apple.com/support/finalcutpro/doc...-Paper-July-2009.pdf

Here is an article by Larry Jordan which explains everything better:
www.larryjordan.biz/media-in-fcp-x/

Thank you very much! That pretty much clears it up for me.

Seems like my laptop works the mp4 codec pretty good even in multicam so I'll try working with this for a while. Or buy a TB external drive, I'll see!

Thanks again!