Importing from an existing Event

I have added a bunch of new clips to an Event I now need to import them into the Event. Is there a quick way to sort the clips that haven't already been imported? i.e if I select all the clips now in the Original Media folder and select import will that only import the ones that haven't already been imported or will it import ALL again so I will have duplicates?

Hi Marc,

I guess you mean you have imported new media into an existing Event without copying the original media into the Event folder and now you want to copy over only the new media?

In that case select your Event in the Event Library and choose File > Organize Event files. This will copy all your media into your Event folder, ignoring media that are already inside the folder.

Here you see two clips in the Event folder, one has been copied over and the other is linked to media outside the Event:



Select the Event and choose File > Organize Event files



A warning will appear telling you that media will be moved to the Event folder, press Continue



You will see FCPX starts copying your media over and when it's done every clip that was linked to media outside your Event folder will have been copied over into the Original Media folder of your Event, no duplicate clips will be copied




- Ronny

Thanks for the reply Ronny but I had already copied them into the Original Media folder so using that method doesn't work because they already live in the Event.

I'll just do some manual organising in the Finder and work out what I need to import.

You manually copied media into an Event folder?

Yes. I had a situation where additional footage from a shoot was not imported into the Event that I was working on so instead of going through all the rushes I just copied everything to the Original media folder and the files that were missing were copied over.

Marc Lucas wrote: Yes. I had a situation where additional footage from a shoot was not imported into the Event that I was working on so instead of going through all the rushes I just copied everything to the Original media folder and the files that were missing were copied over.

Yeah you shouldn't do that. FWIW, had you simply dragged all the media onto your event in X, it would have (I think) ignored the existing media and just copied in the new stuff. So poking around in the finder is likely the only way to deal with it now. Try to find the "missing" stuff in the Original media folder, remove it, and then import it via FCP X, not the Finder.

"...had you simply dragged all the media onto your event in X, it would have (I think) ignored the existing media and just copied in the new stuff."

Actually, drag-and-drop will do whatever is configured in the Preferences > Import settings. Those settings are there specifically for drag-and-drop operations from Finder windows.

And yes, never copy stuff into an Event folder manually.

All sorted go myself out of that mess quite quickly, however, what I decided to do was setup a Smart Collection to quickly organise the freshly imported clips.



I thought the best way was to set it up as a 'date imported' collection to 1 day as you can see in the pic. As I imported the clips nothing happened no clips were put in that Smart Collection. Even when I had organised by date in the Event Browser the 'date imported date' as Oct 8th? These clips were originally imported into another FCPX system then sent to me so I take it FCPX is referencing the first time they were imported into FCPX regardless of my import. Just tried the Smart Collection and yes it does read the original date that they were first imported.