Needing Support

Hey all my name is Justin I have posted a few times and always appreciate the support, its great, thanks

I am currently working on a project putting together footage from the last 4 months travelling. I have all my Raw Video Footage, GoPro and DSLR footage on a 1TB Hard Drive.

I am working of a MacBook Pro 2.7Ghz Intel core I7. NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB, Memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. (If that means a lot to you).
It is around 3 years old now.

I have a 3TB hard drive plugged in and I am importing the video files from the 1 TB into FCP and I am saving the FCP Library/Bundle to the 3TB drive, I have also ticked the option to copy the files to the 3TB drive.

I was under the impression (Larry Jordan workshops and what I gathered online) That this is a good way to work. Then once I have imported everything I unplug the 1TB hard drive and just work of the 3TB hard drive

1) Just wondering if you think this is a good way to do things?

2) Another question is how do you import your media, i find it a bit slow to have to select a clip then hold Command and select another one and if I don't want to import it I then need to click on it again well holding common to unselect it, and this process is a bit slow when you have 2000+ clips to work through

Does that make sense? Any advice would be great?

Cheers Justin

Hi Justin,
working with a huge library file is an option but, after experimenting all the possible configurations, I ended up choosing to always leave the files "in place". Notice that sometimes, with certain camera, the "leave in place" option is greyed out. In these cases I move the imported files from inside the library to a folder next to the original files, then relink those files, then delete the original card structure (if I don't want duplicated files).
Usually I have one big disk for original media, and another one for the library. If I create proxy media I can edit without the big "media disk", with just the library disk that include the proxies.
I would like to say that this is my way of working and it is just a way of doing things.

justin_lucas wrote: ....how do you import your media, i find it a bit slow to have to select a clip then hold Command and select another one and if I don't want to import it I then need to click on it again well holding common to unselect it, and this process is a bit slow when you have 2000+ clips to work through....

After copying the camera native files to a RAID array, I import all media with "leave files in place" without examining any of it outside FCPX. I also leave all other import analysis options off.

This is a different process than the traditional approach back before Final Cut had good camera native performance. Also transcoding to optimized media was/is time consuming and disk drive space was more expensive. This led people to be very stingy about not "cluttering up their library with a lot of junk". Times change and the hardware/software situation is very different today.

Now FCPX generally does a good job on most camera native formats, performance wise. Hard disk space is much less expensive and nothing is faster at evaluating the material than the FCPX skimmer. After you are finished editing you can always copy the small % of the content you actually select to another library then archive it.

If you need proxy mode for better editing performance you can usually still skim the camera native files, mark your initial selects, then pick only those clips and transcode them to proxy. You don't necessarily need to transcode a vast amount of raw material to optimized or proxy if you'll only be using a small % of it.

This is one of the biggest advantages of FCPX. With pretty much every other editor you need to use some kind of external tool to pre-evaluate the content before importing it. There are some tricks with VLC for this and ways to view a "contact sheet" in Finder, which now has tags. However nothing is as fast as FCPX at skimming and marking selects. Is is a dream product for documentary editors or anybody else managing a large shooting ratio: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_ratio

Thanks a lot for the info. Great to hear what others do. Anyone else willing to share their general setup.

So after checking I am coping the files to the Library 3TB external Hard drive. Then once everything is imported and copied to FCP I will unplug the 1TB hard drive with the Raw footage and work of the 3TB drive. I found when I left the files in place FCP was a lot slower and skimming was a little jumpy.....?

This has worked for me in the past I will stick with it for now but its great to hear how others do it.

I also Create optimised media. not sure if this is the correct thing to do?

Cheers for the info any other advice would be appreciated.

justin_lucas wrote: ...I found when I left the files in place FCP was a lot slower and skimming was a little jumpy.....?

Normally on a contemporary desktop machine you'll get good performance with most HD codecs leaving files in place. However some codecs are highly compressed and take more CPU to process smoothly -- GoPro is a good example. In those cases creating optimized or proxy media makes it smoother and more responsive.

If your particular machine works better creating optimized media, that is fine. The only downside is it requires time to transcode to that format, and typically it takes about 8x the storage of camera native H264.

In the viewer at top right you can select "Better Quality" or "Better Performance". In some borderline cases just picking "Better Performance" will give enough performance boost you don't have to create optimized media.

Another option is transcoding to proxy media, which can be done on import or afterward. In the viewer at top right you pick "proxy media" and FCPX thereafter uses that. It is transparent to any editing -- you just continue as normal, but you must remember to switch back to "optimized/original" before you export to an output file. The advantage of proxy is the internal files are a lot smaller than optimized media and this can further streamline performance. It can also save space, but you apparently have plenty of space.

It is easy to run out of space due to FCPX internal use of render files. An easy way to keep track of these and clean them up is the 3rd party Final Cut Library Manager: www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/ This is not required and you can do it within FCPX, but this utility is inexpensive and very easy to use.

If you are satisfied with the current editing performance using optimized media and you have no space issues, just keep doing that.

Thanks a lot Joe, helps discussing this with people sometimes feel in a little bubble, Don't really have anyone that edits locally so great to be able to discuss this.

Thanks ill keep importing away, long process hehe But worth it in the end!!!!

Cheers

for my weekly sports-reports, I like to store my diff. cameras files onto several drives. Only one cam records AVCHD, it has to be copied into Lib. All other material is mov or mp4, is 'left in place'.

When combining them in a Multicam, this 'distributed file locations' gives me a superb performance. No proxy/optimized, although fullHD....

As non-engineer interesting fact: on Windows boards tides are high about what beast of CPU and GPU is needed for a handful of fullHD streams; I'm working with a MacMini = no designated GPU at all :woohoo:
And, Mr Mestman demoed 84 streams of 4k, let alone 10 on a MacBookPro
www.fcp.co/forum/2-off-topic/25038-sam-m...k-from-one-box#73952