How to do collaboration in video projects with weekly episodes, interview style?

So far, I've been doing most editing as a single FCP/X user, but we will probably need able to share the editing efforts between several persons this year. Not running XSAN or similar, using local disks and shared disks on a server via SMB and/or NFS.

In another professional life, I'm doing +100 pages of Powerpoint presentations on site with teams of several people and it's a nightmare with deadlines as the program is not suited to several people working on the same storyboard. I.e. lack of version handling, page locking instead of file locking etc.

So my question is what is feasible to do concurrently for several persons in FCP/X, and even more important, what is not.

It would be great if you could you share your experiences in this area

Get in touch with LumaForge, your best bet, their Jellyfish appliance.j

You can share External Media, you can't share Libraries. So you build Libraries that point to External Media, and take care of that issue. Wold need details about your workflow before going into details of what you can and can't do.

LumaForge can answer all your questions, also.

Use local edit disk, but have a media server with 1 Gb ethernet connections
- Store all clips in separate folder per card, with unique names.
- Import each card to in FCP/X as external media & leave in place in one event per card.
- Use sync-n-link to such video clips with audio using time-code - synced clips in new event for each day

- Frame.io for review of intermediate edits

Would like to improve workflow to several persons doing different parts of edit depending of their skill and availability.

casimir_artmann wrote: Use local edit disk, but have a media server with 1 Gb ethernet connections...synced clips in new event for each day...Would like to improve workflow to several persons doing different parts of edit depending of their skill and availability.

Collaborative workflow breaks down into two broad categories: LAN-connected "continuously online" scenarios like yours, and geographically distributed, intermittently connected (or cloud connected) scenarios. You are the first category, although a large number of collaborative scenarios are geographically distributed with intermittent or lower-bandwidth connections. Apple really needs to provide a well-thought-out solution for both of those cases.

For each of those cases, there are two other basic divisions of collaborative work: timeline editing vs metadata organizing. Unfortunately much of the traditional discussion is focused on collaborative timeline editing, likely because (except for FCPX) all other editing software has very limited organizational features. IOW the timeline is all they've got so they think of everything in terms of the timeline.

With FCPX a significant fraction of the broader "editing" task is organizing content, not cutting on the timeline. Thus a major issue is how can collaborative assistants concurrently work on this vital and time-consuming phase. Unfortunately FCPX has no multi-user resource locking of any type, not even Avid's primitive "bin locking".

However, you can have several editors, each rating/keywording data in their own event -- provided this is manually coordinated. If there is ever confusion and two editors tag metadata in the same event, the only way to merge that is using MergeX. This works but you cannot have any projects in those events -- projects must be kept in their own event due to a limitation in the current version of MergeX: www.merge.software/

There is also a bug in FCPX's XML processing which will create spurious duplicate clips if loading XML from an event without totally unique clip file names. E.g, several Sony cameras reset the filename sequence to C0001 after a card is changed, and this cannot be modified in camera. Even if each batch of files is kept in a separate unique folder, and even though FCPX automatically adds an internal "uniquifier" suffix upon import, those filenames will cause spurious duplicates during XML processing. The only current solution is rename all files before import to ensure they are globally unique across all content used in a given endeavor. I use the 3rd party utility A Better Finder Rename for this: www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/

In the 4k era most work requires proxies. This adds another complication since FCPX has no well-supported method of placing proxies outside the library. The manual (and somewhat complex) procedure is described in Ripple Training's Media Management class: www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cu...-final-cut-pro-10-4/

Using external proxies can be further convoluted by a bug/behavior such that libraries using these cannot reliably be relinked if the drive volume name is different from the original. However in the LAN scenario this may be less an issue if the media is on common LAN-connected storage.

In a collaborative situation it is very easy for multiple editors to import media from local "oddball" locations like Downloads or DropBox. Andreas has written a nice utility to track down these stray files and ensure all media referenced in a library, event or project is located on the proper media volume: www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...ss-hard-drives#92661

For those contemplating LAN-type collaboration, Peter wrote a helpful article exploring the use of 3rd party utilities to sync internal library data from multiple users: www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1938-c...-first-working-steps

Great thanks!