Archiving Media?

Hi, Newbe to FCPX coming from Sony Vegas Pro. I'm going to import video from my SD card and create an Archive. Upon doing so, I would like to delete and/or trime clips some clips to save storage space prior to archiving. I can't figure out how to do this. Is there a way? Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks, Ray

In FCPX « archive » means integral copy of the camera card which is why you had an unsatisfactory answer on an other Forum. What you can do to achieve your goal is to set up a special import library with an external destination folder or disk … then go to the import window to select only the parts the clips you want to import (copy). I would however still store the original camera cards or make a « camera archive » for real security.

RayPaula wrote: Hi, Newbe to FCPX coming from Sony Vegas Pro. I'm going to import video from my SD card and create an Archive. Upon doing so, I would like to delete and/or trime clips some clips to save storage space prior to archiving. I can't figure out how to do this. Is there a way? Any help would be most appreciated.

I'll try to give you a general overview. First of all, you waste a lot of time worrying about storage space. My advice is, buy cheap USB storage for archiving your cards. Think of the archive as a backup. Get as much fast enough and big hard disks space as you can afford for the actual editing, preferably external, preferably Thunderbolt. Look at all modern Macs (MB, MBP, iMac, MP). Their internal space is too limited to handle a couple of medium sized 4k projects, more so if you transcode to ProRes. Think of your Mac as a hub for external drives. If you have, say, a MBP and already find it crammed with libraries, move the libraries (at least the ones you are not currently working on) to external drives.

Now, from the point of view of someone who does feel uncomfortable with unused stuff blocking his space, there are solutions to consolidate. If a card structure exists, FCP X won't allow you to leave files in place, but it offers you a very good and fast preview of the clips on the card. You could simply spend some time to evaluate your footage during import instead of importing all and rejecting later. This would be a typical FCP X workflow (coming from old FCP, where files needed to be logged & transferred). Copy (=import) only the clips (or portions of clips!) you need to the library (and again, the library can be external and the media doesn't have to be inside the library).

In Sony Vegas, did you never keep a backup? Space too expensive for that? You will sense that I don't subscribe to this way of thinking, but if you picked the good shots during import in FCP X and deleted the card/card copy/archive immediately afterwards, you had already reduced the number of existing clips.

Once again: FCP X ist not particularly hungry for RAM, it will perform on older Macs with weaker CPUs, it will work on tiny MB without dedicated graphic card. But you won't ever be happy with it if you are miserly with space.

RayPaula wrote: Hi, Newbe to FCPX coming from Sony Vegas Pro. I'm going to import video from my SD card and create an Archive. Upon doing so, I would like to delete and/or trime clips some clips to save storage space prior to archiving. I can't figure out how to do this. Is there a way?...

Storage space is cheap and each action you take to "prune" the dataset before archiving incurs (a) time/effort, and (b) the possibility of user error.

For small or non-critical projects you can import directly from the camera card. For larger projects we usually download and duplicate the card contents in the field using copy verification tools like ShotPut Pro: www.imagineproducts.com/index.php?main_p..._info&products_id=59 or Beyond Compare: www.scootersoftware.com/

Once the contents are downloaded, duplicated and verified, the card can be assigned to a pool for reuse.

Especially with the complicated card structure and intermixed stills/video used by some cameras, it is very easy to make a mistake if trying to selectively copy or delete data from a disk version of the folder tree. I would never, ever manually delete files from the card itself.

You apparently are trying to prune data at or near import time. FCPX does support selective import for certain camera types, so provided you never make a mistake, that can work. But you don't want cases where you copied all the important clips, reformat the card, then remember there were also still photos which the camera had squirreled away in an obscure subfolder.

There is a better case for saving/archiving a subset of actually used clips in a library after editing, which can be a small fraction of the imported clips. Even then I'd normally recommend saving everything, but you can copy the used clips to a transfer library and then back that up.

Thanks to all for the great tips and advice. I do realize that archiving from a SD card is bit for bit keeping the entire folder intact. I'm archiving simply for having a backup of my original media and for pointing at it for editing. I simply wanted to delete some clips as needed within the archive process instead of doing it in camera first. I now realize that deleting clips during archiving isn't possible within FCPX unless a Library is used. I'm not ready to start editing at this time, I just want to dump my media for now. I always back up to external drive/s and never on the OS drive. I keep my OS drive for software, plugins, etc., never media. I plan on using a Pegasus thunderbolt 3 in either a 6 or 8 drive array in RAID 5. Thanks again for all your help. Ray

RayPaula wrote: ...I plan on using a Pegasus thunderbolt 3 in either a 6 or 8 drive array in RAID 5. Thanks again for all your help. Ray

Those are very good but depending on your space requirements and budget, you can get an 8TB Thunderbolt 2 SSD RAID-0 array for about $3k. It does about 1,240 MB/sec on BlackMagic, and it's vastly faster than any physical drive in random I/O, which FCPX does a lot of in the Event Browser. Unlike physical drives the performance does not degrade as the drive fills up.

What I use is the OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini: eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB4MJB0GB/
Combined with 4 x 2TB Samsung EVO 850 SSDs: a.co/eSyrWCX
Using SoftRAID, but you could actually use the built-in AppleRAID: www.softraid.com/

Very nice drives..... Thanks for the links. I will take a deeper look into them. Thanks again, Ray