TV/Web-series media management suggestions?

Hey!

We have started shooting a TV show / YouTube thing.

It will be sent as a TV show on a local TV-station and consist of around 10 different segments, each of which will then individually be posted to a YouTube channel.

How would you go about organising the media for this?

LIBRARY (one library for everything, I'm thinking)
EVENT - one for each segment, episodes seperated by keywords etc)
or
EVENT - one for each episode, segments seperated/organised by keywords
or some other way?
PROJECTS - not sure if I will do one with the complete episode or have a project for each segment and then stitch them together somehow to create the full TV show thing...

How would you approach this?

There's no rules about what you should or shouldn't do.

I'm post supervisor for a new reality TV show, it was shot in an odd way, due to the situation we were in. Each day of shooting has cameras in specific physical areas, or situations. I have one folder in my Finder for all FCPX Libraries. I build a Library for each day of shooting, an Event for each camera group, and then keyword for each camera card. I actually have a full article coming out in a couple of months when we complete all 13 episodes. And all of our media is kept external.

Don't shy away from multiple Libraries. To give specific advice, I'd need to know more details about what the show is about, how the segments/episodes are set up, etc.

Thanks Ben.

I know there's no hard rules. Was just looking for some ideas... I have never really done anything like this...

Here's more details:

Each episode is around 10 segments. Each segments is usually one or two hosts talking, shot with two cameras (two angles). Audio is recorded in camera (via wireless mics). Then there's b-roll and close ups etc done in seperate takes.

Each time we shoot we do at least two episodes worth. (hopefully up to 4 at one go).

Then there will be music and the intro/vignette thing at start of each segment plus show (same every episode)...

Guess that's it. But will mount up fairly quickly I guess...

Without knowing too much, I would go with one library for each episode, inside that library use one event for each segment, then use keywords/smart collections for more specific filtering/sorting of media.

DmitriZigany wrote: ...It will be sent as a TV show on a local TV-station and consist of around 10 different segments, each of which will then individually be posted to a YouTube channel.
...How would you go about organising the media for this? ...Each episode is around 10 segments. Each segments is usually one or two hosts talking, shot with two cameras (two angles). Audio is recorded in camera (via wireless mics). Then there's b-roll and close ups etc done in seperate takes...
How would you approach this?

There is no fixed approach. Before 10.2, the inability to have library-wide smart collections might favor having fewer events. Performance on earlier versions of FCPX was less predictable which might have favored limiting number of clips per library.

However now we can have library-wide searches, and I have 5,600 clips (2.2 terabytes) in a single event in a single library, and performance seems OK. That's on a top-spec 2015 iMac 27 and 8TB Pegasus R4.

Now that FCPX can import Finder tags and use folders as keywords, this might tend to lessen the need of using events for purely organizational purposes. IOW if all the content is going to be tagged anyway (whether manually or automatically on import), you don't necessarily need an event folder to find stuff.

You cannot search across libraries so this would argue for not splitting closely-related content between libraries. But this varies based on the type of project. Some episodic material almost never references content from other episodes, whereas other types frequently do this.

In general I would suggest restraint in organizational granularity -- number of libraries, number of events, number of keywords/collections. It is easy to enthusiastically impose a bunch of stuff up front, then it ends up you don't need it or it's even in the way.

The chosen organizational strategy works best if it's closely attuned to the editor's preferences and working style. This may not be knowable up front, in which case you'd have to use whatever generic approach makes sense.

If library portability is a factor, that might argue for using multiple smaller libraries, not one huge one.

I think the FCPX search scope behavior is:

- If event is selected, search will be within that event
- If library is selected, search will be across all events in the library
- Keyword collections are within a single event
- Library-wide smart collections can be created at the library root level
- To create a library-wide keyword collection, create a Library Smart Collection using one or more keywords as the search criteria

One library for each episode, I agree with that.

Here is some more content from Apple's white paper "Managing Media with Final Cut Pro X Libraries":
www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Media_Management.pdf

"The general concept is that all of the media files required for a specific job
are contained within a library. Here are some examples of possible library workflows:"

"- Episode of a dramatic series: The library can contain all the footage for producing a
single episode. If you use content from a previous episode, you can open that library
and copy media or events into the current library."

"- Season of a reality show: Reality shows are shot over a longer period of time, and
stories are constructed based on the content that is captured. Media is often used
across multiple episodes, and less commonly across multiple seasons as the characters
and story lines may change too dramatically."

"An event might represent a day of shooting, an episode of a dramatic series, a location in a reality show, a portion of a wedding such as the reception or ceremony, or a series of edited projects."

"Using an event as a “collection” that can be handed off to another editor or an
assistant on the team is a good use of the library model. For example, an assistant
editor can create an event for a day’s dailies and hand this over to the primary editor,
and the editor can create an event containing his or her cuts for a scene or reel of a
movie to hand back to the assistant."

BenB wrote: One library for each episode, I agree with that.

My biggest issue with that is that if you want to use same media it's copied and will take up double the hard drive space. I'm not so fond of using external media...

DmitriZigany wrote: My biggest issue with that is that if you want to use same media it's copied and will take up double the hard drive space. I'm not so fond of using external media...

Actually, no it doesn't. FCPX uses soft and hard UNIX links. So even if a clip is "copied" to another Library, only a "link" is created, not a full duplicate of the clip. And links take up so little room, only about 7k, so it is negligible. I have a video explaining it all here.
finalcutprox.guru/tutorials/page12/level1finalcutprox/

Why not use external media?

Ah, I didn't know that, Ben. Thats great information, thanks!

Well, I just like the convenience of importing it directly with FCPX and that it merges split files that belong together etc. But writing this I just realised that things have changed and you now can specify an external place when importing footage, right?
And I have started using the footage from my Odyssey 7Q externally (has it has to be imported to the hard drive first anyway).

Maybe I have to look over my media organisation in more ways than one

Yep, we've been able to specify an external location for importing and cache for a while now. Merging split clips is a feature of the importing process, not whether it's going to be internal or external to the library.

For mutli-library workflows, I would advise externally located media. Even though you can have hard links, one of your libraries will be the large one, and it could get confusing if you're juggling libraries ... like if you start doing things like importing into different libraries at different times. With all externally managed media, it could all live in one folder always, with an unlimited number of libraries all pointing to the same media.