How to organize 250hrs of footage?

Dear FCPX users,

at this moment I'm capturing hundreds of hours of my VHS-archives. All of those contain registrations of live performances and I want to save and edit the best parts. The biggest challenge will be how to organize in such way, that I'll be able to group similar subjects and themes. Each VHS-tape is between 1 and 4 hours long. When I'm done capturing the tapes, there will be approx 75 videos with a total duration of 250 hours.

I am aware that an event of 250 hours isn't anything new, but the peculiarity is the duration of each file, which makes it a chore to look at in the event window.

What I would like to to is go through each video in a timeline, cut and delete the bad parts, tag the good stuff. In the event the keywords should appear and when selected, only the parts tagged with that keyword should appear, NOT the full video of which some part or parts are tagged with that keyword. How can that be achieved?

In the end I'd love to trim the project (like in Premiere) only to keep the good parts, which will be 10% or probably less.

Thanks in advance for any help.

It is achieved by doing exactly what you just stated. When you select a clip, or range of a clip, and assign a keyword, a Keyword Collection is automatically created. When you select that specific collection in the Browser, ONLY the range that contains that keyword is shown, as if it were an independent clip. It happens automatically.

When you have ranges of clips tagged as Good or Rejected, when you set the Browser's Clip Filter at the top left of the Browser, you can show only the ranges marked as Good, or Rejected, or whatever.

It is all automatic.

You can select a whole bunch of clips all at one time in the Browser, hit E, and they all get put into your Timeline, very easy.

Hi Jerome,

You can do the way Ben explained and then use the Primary Exporter ( www.primariesexporter.com/ ). You will get only the clips you used as single files.

The other option is to use my Virtual Camera Card ( www.spherico.com/filmtools/X-Files/VirtualCameraCard.dmg ) with your digitized tapes. It allows to select portions of the tapes for import into FCPX. If you got questions there is a PDF ( www.spherico.com/filmtools/X-Files/VCC.pdf )

- Andreas

Thanks guys!

the workflow seems clear now. The links to the apps are interesting. The VCC seems not too handy for my purpose (some 4hr tapes will have tens of selections) but the PrimariesExporter, or ClipExporter do, even though I can't tell immediately what exactly makes those different from each other, except the (pretty high) pricing.

As matter of fact, it's pretty ridiculous that FCPX doesn't have a trimming function. Of the expected 3TB of footage I'll keep 300GB at most. Another 3TB disk costs as much as the mentioned plugin. Well, maybe the next Cyber Monday brings solace :woohoo:

Just a little FYI on new drive shopping. 3TB caught my eye. I've seen several articles warning that 3TBs (as opposed to 2 or 4 ) seem to have a higher failure rate. Here's an article from Cult of Mac that refers to a rather extensive test done by Backblaze on drive reliability:

www.cultofmac.com/309505/massive-hard-drives-big-fail/

And the original article from the Backblaze blog:

www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

Thank you for posting this, Stephen. We have done extensive tests on different 3, 4 and 6 TB drives and I agree that cheap 3TB and higher capacity drives, especially the "green" ones, are liable to more failure. If you want high reliability, the enterprise-class HGST drives are the only ones you should consider. For our newest SAN we have bought 6 TB He (Helium cooled) HGST drives. We expect a failure rate of 1 or 2 drives per year on this system, running 24/7.

- Ronny

I would seriously consider capturing only the good stuff off tape in the first place. I have done it both ways and with large amounts of material it always took less time overall to make the choices up front. FWIW