Where has this Transcoded Media come from and can I delete it?

Hi all,

New to Forum and am fairly new to FCP so bear with me .....

I've imported a fair amount of video and audio in to a new project. Then created a number of compound and multicam clips - but so far I have not manually tried to transcode or create any proxy media.

I now see I have a "Transcoded Media" folder which looks to hold a mirror image of my "Original Media"files except that the Transcoded Media files are considerably larger than the Original Media files. For example an Original file is 827mb whereas the Transcoded file is 6.29 Giga b.

I've probably approached it the wrong way but essentially I imported, then set up a number of compound clips and multicam clips but then found the editing a bit slow so went to create Proxy media but found my hard drive was too full...... hence delving in and finding the Transcoded files.

Can I delete the transcoded files without upsetting all my multi and compound clips?

Many thanks in advance.

By default FCP preferences has created optimized media for multicam clips turned on. Switch this off. Delete the optimized media from inside FCP. Deleted generated files create proxy files for your multicam clips. Don’t know why you’re creating compounds.

Thank you Tom - much appreciated. Have now changed preferences and also deleted optimised media and everything still works fine but now have half my hard drive back

Seems odd though that the generated files were nearly ten times the size of the original media, was that down to the fact one of the camera streams given to me by others was ultra high quality (too high) and due to the sequence of something I had done FCP had tried to upscale the rest of my media to match? - or do I have the wrong end of the stick there?

The reason for compound files - again it may be my newbie error but to explain the thinking was as follows - the project (a 2 hour live music concert that we want to split in to individual song videos) had consisted of 2 hours of continuous footage from my friends static camera where he had unknowingly set it to ultra high quality video and audio (but audio was being captured separately via Pro Tools / multiple mics anyway) so the static camera had automatically chopped the whole concert in to about 8 separate files internally due to file size. I had then recorded the sound via Pro Tools to a more reasonable quality level - 2 individual sets. We then had 2 additional video cameras taking intermittent footage throughout the concert.

So to get a starting point I imported and then stitched together the 8 ultra high quality static cam files (I'm guessing there is probably a better way to import) and then I sync'd the 2 sets of ProTools continuous audio file to that. By now the files size was huge so before I started trying to build Multicam clips I separated the individual songs out as Compound clips which consisted of the static video with ultra high qual audio (which would be eventually muted) and the Pro Tools audio - this gave me a basis of audio and video (1 angle) of complete individual songs in compound clips. One at a time I then took a compound clip and used that as a foundation to then create the Multicam clips to which would include the numerous intermittent snippets of footage that we had taken with the 2 additional cameras to make it more dynamic. Note I did originally try and create a multicam clip first - of the whole concert and using all the various audio and video clips in one go but FCP struggled to sync anything - probably due to the file size - hence me thinking the compound clip route to break things up in to individual songs first was the way to go. Hopefully that explains it and if you see a better work flow then again any advice greatly appreciated - I'm an advanced Pro Tools user but am having to learn FCP on the fly.

Thanks

A great way to approach editing and I am stealing the idea from a youtube video I watched recently, is not to wait for Apple to create a workflow, but to create a workflow that somehow gets you to where you need to be...

For example, I would suggest instead of using compound clips, try using multi-cam. select all the clips for the multi-cam, then create a multi-cam, then "step" into the multi-cam.

One benefit of multi-cam is it allows moving the clips in each "lane" and yes you can add filters to each clip in the lanes, and the multi-cam will play this...That is power..for a couple of hundred Dollars...

Each lane of video, you can select which to monitor, you can move the clips in each land left and right, as if there is a gap clip, again wow!! This is good stuff!!!

Look it might not be ideal, but I don't think Apple will ever include every possible way to do something, and frankly I hope they don't, part of the fun of editing is trying to find new ways to solve a problem, how to do this or that...

Once you start playing with multi-cam, you make cuts, break apart the audio from the video, then just do video cuts, and you can change, slip edits, as you would normally, the point is try different ideas, maybe something just seems obvious, maybe not...