Best way to import/manage parts of very long clips of footage

I have recently made a lot of footage with birds. These creatures are a bit hard to direct to act like you want them to. You just have to shoot and hope for the best and I ended up having several takes with a duration of up to 5 minutes. In the end there may be 10 parts of 10 sec. each that I want to use.

First thing I want to do is sort the footage and find the best parts and save this material in a lib. for use in a coming project.

I was thinking of importing all the takes in full length, make a project and put the parts that I want to use in a timeline, -and here comes my question:

Is it possible to export a timeline as separate clips? And if positive which settings are the best to use? (I normally edit in Pro Res)

...or maybe there is a much better way to deal with this?

www.clipexporter.com

Generally you want to avoid recompressing your media if you can avoid it.

If I export the timeline in ProRes 422 HQ do I then recompress the footage?

There is always recompression, but it will not be noticeable over a few generations. PR HQ is a high data rate format so it's going to take a lot of drive space. I don't know what the original media is. Are you hoping to make your selects, export, dump the originals and then reimport? Depending on your original media this may actually consume more drive space then keeping everything.

Looking at the example above you're selecting about a minute and to a minute and a half out of five minutes. That's not much of savings really. Documentaries are usually working with far, far higher ratios of material. 20-1, 50-1, 100-1 are not uncommon at all.

I confess I'm of the keep everything school of editing, even when we had to work in real offline and batch recapture from tape. Capture everything, keep everything, and sort it out in the software. FCP is excellent at sorting and organizing.

Another way to extract only the parts of clips to be edited is using: Sherico's VIRTUAL CAMERA CARD

www.spherico.com/filmtools/

Manual : www.spherico.com/filmtools/X-Files/VCC.pdf

Fooling FCPX to think it sees a camera card permits you to multi-select only the segments required for import ... even create a camera archive (stock shot BackUp)

cheers

I would have suggested the same thing cause I created the app.

It's pretty handy. I created it because I often have very long shots and converting the material full length often would end up in dozens of TB.
Also s with any camera card switching on clip skimming you can make selections by timecodes noted for example by the customer.

- Andreas

- Andreas

@Francois and AndreasKiel

Wow, tanks. This looks like it is just what I need. Downloading and will try it in a few days.