reservations about using fcpx for doc project

I have been a long time 7 user and have just started using FCPX. I am certainly no expert at x and have been going through tutorials etc...

I need to move from 7 and I like a lot of what x has to offer. BUT I am about to head into post with my documentary and the size for the project and media management tools in x concern me and I am posting to get suggestions here and test the work flow.

My concern is that I have about 8 TB of footage with several shoots abroad.

1) So I created a Library for the project. "Documentary Name"
2) Created events around different aspects of the project - "Kosovo shoot" "Iraq shoot" "personal story"....
3) Then created projects to work on scenes and started organizing footage within the events.

First issue is that there is no sub clipping for long interviews. Tagging is only good for universal attributes and it isn't efficient to tag unique parameters of each clip because you end up with dozens of tags only applied to one clip. Favorites is even less specific to the clip. Neither one of these allows you to rename the portion of the clip you are working with.

creating a compound clip seems to be the closest thing to sub clipping x offers and I was willing to give it a go (although I'm still trying to wrap my head around the workflow) until something really weird happened last night while working on a sample for a grant. I created a event called "grant sample" which had footage in the event. I was also working in the "personal story" event going through an interview for the sample. The interview was 90 minutes long and I was tagging, favoriting and compounding trying to organize the footage. I may have tried dropping a bit of the footage from the interview in the "personal story" event into "grant sample project." All of a sudden half the interview was no longer in the personal story event and now in the "grant sample" event. It moved without me telling it to.

My guess is that any footage used in a project needs to be in that specific event. So basically, and I'm asking, I need to put all the footage from my documentary, 400 hours, into one event? This has dozen of interviews and locations. Does anyone have suggestions on how to organize that much footage using these tools?

From my experience so far, keywords and favorites alone are not a solution. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hey bosindy. Learning X requires a change of mindset in a couple of areas, but I think you'll find once you figure out how it can work for you it's way more powerful in some respects than 7, and logging is definitely one of those areas.

You can apply keywords to entire clips, but you can also apply keywords to RANGES of clips. So if in 5 interviews the same 10 questions are bing asked, you could easily create a keyword collection for each of those questions, and select and apply that keyword to only the portions of your clips to which it applies.

Favorites can also be either entire clips or ranges of clips, and once you create a "Favorite", you can change the name of the Favourite to whatever you like. And what you name that clip is searchable as text in the Event search field.

They key thing to understand about logging clips in X is that you don't ned to duplicate clips to apply different attributes. The combination of KEYWORDS, NAMED FAVOURITES, and other text in the NOTES field makes finding material in large projects incredibly fast. Smart Collections add an extra powerful tool, allowing you to create "smart bins" which collect ANY footage which satisfies a given set of parameters.

While I'm still in the process of upgrading to 10.1 myself, multiple events in one Library should work like multiple events did on a single drive- if you have the Library selected, and you do a search for the word "cat" it should search ALL Events in the Library for that search string.

there's a lot to know and understand to get the most out of logging material in X, but I assure you it's EXTREMELY powerful and should work well for you once you wrap your head around how things work.

To add to that spot on advice. Think of "keyword ranges" as sub-clips. Favorite and Rejected tags are limited, but handy when you need them. And don't get hung up on the terminology. I call them "red" and "green" tags, and use them for a variety of purposes, depending on the nature of the production.

And don't be afraid to break your production up into multiple Libraries. Create one folder on your media drive called something like "My Great Documentary", and put all of the Libraries you create in there. Just depends on the structure of your production.

I know a few folks here in the Louisiana film industry who have completed short and feature length documentaries with FCP X and loved it. A friend teaches documentary filmmaking at a university here, and refuses to teach editing on anything but FCP X.

Thanks for the reply!

I understand you can apply keywords to ranges, but documentary interviews don't necessarily have a consistent format "same 5 questions" and there are parts of an interview that are unique to THAT interview.

What you say about renaming favorites might work, So if there is part of an interview for example where the subject talks about something specific, "incident x" are you saying I can favorite it and reference that story?

As far as events, I still don't understand why the footage jumped into a different event. If I can't trust that where the footage resides is going to remain consistent, that might be a deal killer for me.

Thanks Ben! Different Libraries might work for each of the shoots. I will need to be able to take footage from one library and apply it to a project within another library. So if the "rough assembly" project is in Library A -> event A -> Project A and I want to grab footage for the rough assembly from Library B -> event D is that going to cause an issue.

That footage moving last night on its own confused me quite a bit.

I was only offering up the "5 questions" as an example of what might be a good use of keywords.

How you decide what to use KEYWORDS, FAVORITES, NOTES, and other searchable terms for is a process ultimately you'll figure out on your own. There are lots of great tutorials online about tagging footage- I'll see if I can find a couple.

As for favourites, yes. When you range a FAVORITE, if you click on the word FAVORITE in the list view, you can enter a custom name- that custom name can include any organizational text you like.

As an overarching example, you could use KEYWORDS to tag interviewees. And then FAVORITES to tag individual topics in answers. And don't forget you can have multiple and overlapping favourites in a single clip.

OK, using Libraries that way may not be the way to go. A Library is an independent universe. They don't talk to each other, or know others exist. So when you take a clip from one Library, and drop it into a Timeline in a different Library, it will physically copy that clip over to the second Library. Duplicating your media.

The way to approach this would be to store your media in plain old folders on your drive, and have your Libraries "link" to them. During the Import process, you are able to dictate where the physical media files will live. Simply specify your media folder. This makes all of your media "External Media", and when going from one Library to another, all it duplicates is a "link file", which takes up next to no drive space at all.