Weekly show is.... library or event?

We're doing a weekly show and I'm starting to thing that we do not organize it the right way.

We've been doing like this:

Every week a new show gets its own "library"

A show is made of 8-9 parts, each an "event" in the show library

Different edits of the parts are projects in the events

The main show is also a project, made up from the best sub projects.

Is this the way Apple intended when they made the FCPX structure? How would you structure it?

Kinda depends on how much of the shows you reuse week over week. For example, I'd probably create a Library of bumpers, intros and outros that I could reuse each week. As far as one event per section of the show, again it would be hard to say without knowing a bit more about the contact. Generally speaking I prefer to organize events more by the way they were shot than how they're intended to be edited. But it would also depend a bit on the volume of footage per event.

Can you share more about the content, volume, etc.

It sounds like you are fine as far as a Library per episode. You might consider Compound Clips per section vs. Projects as they can be placed into Events etc and organized a bit more freely while Projects live at the top of a Library. And it sounds like you have more Events than you might need per episode. You can always subdivide Events much more flexibly via keywording, favoriting, smart collections, etc.

I agree that you seem to have more Events than really needed, especially for a weekly show. You could easily have one single event for your weekly media and use keyword collections, smart collections etc... to organize the media inside this event.

BTW: Noah, welcome and good to see you here!

- Ronny

Thanks Ronny- psyched to be here.

-Noah

Oh, thanks - we've actually never used the keyword-part of FCPX.

So what you're suggesting, is ONE library for all our weekly shows.

Then ONE event pr. weekly show.

Then a project for main edit and then........ what?

Are you thinking that our way of using projects is good and that the only change would be to tag using keywords instead of having events for each part of the show?

You wouldn't do the 8-9 show parts in each their own projects ?

Ps. Doesn't a libray-pr-show allow for much easier backing up? Then it's just to drag that file on to our backup server. If a library contains several shows, we then need to move the finished ones out of the library and into another backup-library, which is more work, right?

I'm beginning to feel that Events now are just a waste of time. All they do is over complicate things.
So if it was me. I'd do a library for the show and put episodes in their own folders.

This makes it much much easier to share footage across episodes plus create keyword groups that cover the whole show.

I'm no professional producer of a show, but do too a 'weekly' program = Junior's soccer league weekend games.

my needs are:
* 'standards' = uniform material in use in most shows, as openers, bumpers....
* 'best of season' = every 6 months, I edit the highlights of each weekly ganme into a 8-10min project
* weekly 'show' = the games itself

So, I have a Lib 'soccer/season14-15' (and a Lib 'Wedding Chris', 'Manifesto', 'dit&dat Test Material' etc etc).

Each game, recorded with six cameras, gets into one Event
Due to FCPX' superb organizing abilities, I have fast access to 'cams'/angles, can create my multicams, index my favorites, highlights, slowmos etc. The keyword collections make it drop-dead easy to organize hours of raw material within a few clicks.
.. and my standards are just a click away anyhow.

End of season, the highlight reel gets edited = smart collection of 'used' + 'highlight'; then render files erased; Lib closed; transferred to 'morgue harddrive'; done.

Backups are easy, the Lib contains all stuff needed.-

I would never ever again organize so much material manually - ... :
Drawers/folders = 1 clip, 1 place
Keywords/Tags = 1 clip, many places...

For me, as a hobbyist, a bit over-the-top, but this Tutorial is a real eye-opener:
www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/1436-...-with-michael-garber

Yeah I wouldn't want to say for sure that one Library for the whole show makes sense- it would entirely depend on how you have your drives setup, how much collaboration is needed, how much footage there is in a given episode etc. I'd probably err more on the side of a Library per episode for ease of organization and flexibility down the road for archiving and recalling specific episodes without needing to open the entire series.

Check into Compound Clips vs. Projects- they have a lot of advantages.

Has the issue of too many CC's bungling up FCPX performance been fixed?

Also, yeah, keep in mind if you have bumpers, etc, that need to be used repeatedly every week, create a Library for those, and keep them as External Media. Then when you use them in your current week's Library, they won't take up duplicate space on your drive.

in his newsletter of this week, Larry Jordan posted a link to this in-depth article about Library Management
www.larryjordan.biz/fcp-x-divide-large-libraries/

He's mentioning some 'benchmarks' of recommended max. number of clips etc ...

Very interesting read!

I would avoid using just one library for all your episodes. Even if it makes sharing media across episodes a little more convenient, it will definitely bog down the system over time. It's also a lot harder to keep your archives organized, as you have mentioned.

In my experience, there definitely is a limit on how many projects and compound clips you can have in a library before performance takes a nosedive. We use external media at our company because we share libraries and move them around a lot, and we have a large pot of centralized storage that all the bays have access to.

For a weekly show, I recommend a library per episode, but also create a library that's a sort of "template" with your show opens, lower thirds, recurring graphics and media, all organized. If all media is external, you can pull freely from this library as needed without duplicating any media. Another way you can do it is to duplicate this template library every time you have a new episode, and you have all you need to start a new episode.

As for events, I tend to have one for source footage, a separate event for graphics, a separate event for audio, and a separate one for projects (timelines). The only reason for us to have these separate events is for easier consolidation. For example, we have a centralized space where we keep all our sound effects, and every project just references these files. But if an editor needs to work off-site, we will simply consolidate that Audio event, and that pulls a copy of all the audio onto an external drive, and away he goes. Every library will usually link to an organized project folder, where all the media and assets live.

If you are doing this library-per-episode organization, you can just make one project folder per season, and all libraries can use this one folder, where you keep adding media and assets as they are shot per episode. You can do incremental archives of this folder as the season goes, or do the archive at the end of the season.