Library, event and media best practice

Hi all. First off, I’m an avid (heh, sorry) FCP.co fan! I love the community and the site is usually one of the first I visit each day when I get up. A huge thanks to the owner and the regular contributors for keeping it so active and current.

I have a fairly basic question (I think) and I’m not sure if there is really a *right* answer or if it’s up to individual preference. Is there a best practice to utilising multiple events within a Library?

I’m busy with a job that has a couple thousand clips with some pretty extensive organisation of said clips. All the media is within one Library, under one event (“Media”) and within that event the media has been keyworded and further categorised within folders etc. This includes video, lots of stills, some graphics work, music and so on. Everything is working pretty well, albeit a little slow but I think under the circumstances X is holding up better than say PP would.

Would you say this is the correct way of working with regard to using the Event as the overarching, all encompassing bin (apologies for the use of such outdated lingo;) that holds all the media for the job at hand, or should I be splitting up my footage into multiple events within the Library and then keywording and organising further within the events? Would this event separation help performance in any way with big jobs such as this? How would one know whether to use multiple events within a library? Do you base the decision from the amount of media you’re dealing with?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Basically our organizational elements: Library, Event, Media, Collections, Folders, are all simply tools. How you use them is up to you. I've seen dozens of different ways to organize with this paradigm, and all work just fine.

First question, are you having any issues locating media quickly? Is this workflow having any issues at all? If so, what specifically?

Maybe some of these articles can be inspirational.
support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&s...inal%20Cut%20Pro%20X

Should you use multiple Events and/or Libraries? Spent time in my FCPX class is week discussing that at length. Answer is, what is your specific situation, needs, workflow requirements?

I'm not sure multiple Events would help performance, that's a situation I'm hoping someone here has experience with and will share with us.

Thanks for your input BenB. The question was more a general one as my workflow is working fine. I just always want to make sure I'm doing things in the best most efficient way. But as suspected it comes down to personal preference and workflow requirements. It's fantastic that X gives the user such options and versatility in the way one can choose to work.

From what I've seen I think that if you need access to all your media during the edit it is probably advisable that you stick to one event. However, if you're working on different edits for say different sections (e.g. scenes/chapters etc) of one big project, then you could split the media across events and you might see a performance improvement whilst working within each event. I'm guessing here though. Would love to know if anyone has tried this approach.

"From what I've seen I think that if you need access to all your media during the edit it is probably advisable that you stick to one event."

Not in FCPX 10.2.1, where we can have Library level Smart Collections.

Multiple Events can be searched in previous versions, too. You simply select the Library, and do your search. Because when you highlight the Library itself in the Libraries pane, the Browser pane shows you everything inside every Event inside that Library.

Nope, no reason to use only one Event. Nope.

Before 10.2 it was better to use one single Event if you wanted to create Smart Collections that affected all the media in your Library.

Since 10.2 we can create Library Smart Collections, which has made the single Event approach redundant.

Wether you chose to put everything inside one Event, or you split your media across different Events, is just a matter of preference and workflow.

- Ronny