Large size on projects-Any suggestion on slimming to share or archive?

Hi,
I’m new to FCPX and I like it a lot, although coming from FCP7, it's a big adjust on almost everything!

As I said, I like it, but one thing concerns me: Project sizes. For some reason, FCPX looks to be not very conservative in terms of hard disk space, but there’s one particularl scenario that is bothering me:

Suppose you are working in a mid sized project with a lot of large clips and you only use a few seconds of each. Apparently there’s no direct way of “consolidate” the media to end up with an reasonably sized interchange or archiving file.
Most other programs that I work with have some sort of consolidation feature, but i can not find something like this in FCPX.
Am I missing something? Or the creators of this software think this feature is unnecessary?
How do you overcome this limitation?

Editing this because Ronny actually read the whole post! :whistle:

There is a way to get part way there. If you make a new library, and copy just the project to an event in the new library, you can use "consolidate event files" which will copy just the footage used in the project.

That doesn't address trimming clips which as Ronny pointed out isn't possible yet in FCP X.

You could do this using a round trip through Resolve but with some gotchas.

Hi Ricardo,

I think you are referring to the "consolidate with trimmed media" feature in FCP7?

If that's what you mean, there is no such thing in FCP X yet and I agree it's a limitation. We have sent dozens of requests to get it but no luck so far. So I would suggest you use the Provide Feedback link in FCP X to ask for this feature as well. They do listen to customer feedback and the more requests a feature gets the more likely it will be in a next version.

Glad to hear you like FCP X. It's a truly wonderful app indeed, but still a work in progress

- Ronny

Thank you guys for the answers.
It's a real limitation not to be able to consolidate with variable handles like the rest of the programs.
Hope someday they include it.

I agree it would be nice to have this, but in today's workflows not having it is IMO not such a big limitation anymore. With tapeless acquisition most post workflows have evolved from just ingesting everything and then searching and making selects during the edit to making selects, trimming and tagging prior to importing. This is much more effective because the editor can start with much better organized and fully searchable media and he can concentrate on the creative process.

We regularly have to use small fragments of long archive media files in documentary work. In our Avid/FCP days we would import the long files and look for the fragment during the edit. At the end of the edit we would consolidate the edit by copying the trimmed media. Now we select the fragment on the archive file prior to importing and we import only what we really need, making consolidation with trimmed media not so much necessary anymore.

- Ronny