Events vs Libraries???

Having not done any regular editing since Final Cut Pro 2, you can imagine that FCP-X is a bit of a jump for me...I'm trying to understand the best way to import my content so that it is easily searchable, and need a hand to understand Events vs Libraries, and the best way forward for importing footage.

The situation is that I was the guy in my gang of friends who had the video camera, and recorded our lives and events over many years...trouble is, most of the original source footage is over 10 years old now, stuck on 200-300 MiniDV tapes, and my concern is that if I don't get the footage off soon, the original tapes will degrade and the footage will be lost forever.

So, what I'm trying to work out is "How do I best arrange this footage at capture?" Do I just have one big library, with defined events within? or is each distinct event to go into a library of its own? or, do I have no events at all and just a library full of tagged footage?

I want to be able to simply tag the footage at import so that I can simply do key word look ups e.g. "2002" will show me all footage from 2002..."40th Birthdays" will show all 40th birthday..."persons name" will show me all footage across the years of that person...etc In my experiments so far, the key word search doesn't seem to search across multiple events, so assuming I'm on the wrong path...?

So, keen to understand how I best search by tags and key words...? To do this, should I not set up any events at all and just have one big library full of footage that is tagged???

Appreciate any guidance the community can provide.

Cheers Rob G

You probably haven't received replies on this because this has been discussed so many times on this forum.

for example:
www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...ructure-advice#94002

The bottom line is that you can sort it however you like. Personally, I would probably make one library, use events for each... well... event, and then create keywords for specific things in each event that you might want to search for. Everyone has a particular sorting scheme that works best for them. Just remember that the more information you enter about each shot, the easier it will be to search through a gazillion hours of footage for a particular captured moment.

Best of luck!

Nobster2300 wrote: … simply do key word look ups e.g. "2002" will show me all footage from 2002..."40th Birthdays" will show all 40th birthday..."persons name" will show me all footage across the years of that person...etc

So, keen to understand how I best search by tags and key words...? To do this, should I not set up any events at all and just have one big library full of footage that is tagged???

Appreciate any guidance the community can provide.

Hi Rob,
what Jarrod already told you there's no 'Best' … just the one which fits your needs best.
First, follow Luís advice, given you at your post at apple.support … An all-in-one 'clip morgue' is huge, based upon your numbers.... (don't forget the factor backup …)

Just recently, for my son's 18th, I grabbed Ye' Ol' Shoebox of Tapes, stored far far away, twenty years old - to my surprise, flawlessly importing, miniDVs and camera (almost) fully functional (kudos to TDK and Sony!)

conc. structure:
date-of-record is part of the 'always included' tech-metas = no need to tag/keyword that…

but 'description' …
sure, could be nice, to 'google' in 300h of personal video - and there are a few automatisms helping you to tag persons, locations, dates … but BEFORE searching would come 'making it findable' … and, that can get you lost:
is Granma/xmas/dinner enough? or, additionally, /fun/burning tree/hilite of year/ …?

For my Birthday video project, I just tagged Favorites + a note what the clips are about (sport, school, kindergarten, etc)

What I like to say:
The 'usual routine' is: think about the end-product, the final movie first - then decide, what kind of sorting, structure, filter you need. Does this funny guy, you only met once on vacation, demand his own keyword? Or don't you find that sequence … or narrow it down with /date/vacation/fun? Or, perhaps, ask your wife "in what year did we met that crazy Kraut, who chatted all day long about his computer?" (women have an insane calender-driven-memory, in my experience!! I don't know what I have done yesterday) - …

FCPX to index 'everything, everywhere, anybody, anytime' is - imho! - not 'nuts n bolts' in movie-making… A copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica doesn't allow you to write a book

There are few technical limitations, e.g. no cross-Libs keyword-searching, but there is also the option, to add/modify/optimize tags any time later…

Sorry for that 'generic yadda' - just telling you to put the cart behind the horse, not in front.

oh, and I forgot: welcome Rob to fcp.co

Nobster2300 wrote: ... 200-300 MiniDV tapes..

Since tape can only be captured at real-time playback rate, you may want to investigate a professional conversion service. As part of that you could consider how to physically label the tape and whether they can apply that label to the file name of each captured tape.

They may also give you an option of capture codec. It would save a lot of transcoding time on your end if this was an FCPX-friendly codec, IOW not AVI, etc.

DV by definition is 4:3 interlaced. In general I'd want the conversion service to not hard deinterlace that or put it in a 720p pillar boxed format, and don't apply any color correction or noise reduction, but give me the interlaced captured file. Then I could process it as I saw fit, and there's no risk of them degrading it with poor deinterlacing.

300 is a lot of tapes, so if you use a commercial service I suggest you have them do just one, then send that and you can inspect and validate before doing the other 299.

If you capture it yourself, you should do something similar -- verify and nail down the process, codec and FCPX ingest before doing hundreds of tapes. Personally I would not want to insert and capture 300 1-hr DV tapes, one-by-one.

I'll throw my 2 cents in here since we do a lot of analog capture for clients, museum and other archival purposes. First, it sounds like to me that you want a database of your tapes to be able to recall and watch them on demand. If this is the case, capturing in FCPX may not be ideal. We use FCPX only if we need to color correct, tweak audio or otherwise transform the video. This approach, however requires you to not only capture the tape, but perform editing/processing and then master out the processed video. This equates to 300 captures, 300 videos being edited and 300 master videos being created. I rather doubt that's what you want to do. Another solution, aside from using FCPX would be to capture in another application that can encode directly to H.264. Quicktime will allow you to capture by creating a new movie recording, and you can select high or maximum quality. High quality encodes directly to H.264 and is more than enough quality for mini-DV tapes, and VHS as well. More advanced programs, like Sorensen Squeeze will also capture directly but using the Apple Intermediate Codec (high quality 8 bit 4:2:0 codec) . This is not a delivery format, but once captured you can immediately transcode to a variety of deliverables. Both Quicktime and Sorenson Squeeze capture smaller file sizes, but Squeeze, like FCPX will require you to master that file for something universal such as MP4. FCPX will capture as a MOV file at ProRes 422, which is a much larger file size. The only other option we use is BMD Media Express, which is a very good utility, but it doesn't capture direct to H.264. It offers many codecs, but the most practical one for capturing analog tapes would be ProRes LT. So, depending on who is intended to be able to view your movies and whether you plan to do any editing to them, FCPX might not be the most efficient solution for you. Also, bear in mind with any DV or VHS captures, dropouts and other tape glitches can upset the capture and result in many individual clips that need to be grouped together in order to create one continuous movie. In this case, FCPX will be helpful as you'll use it to stitch all those clips together. Without hardware to resync the incoming tape stream, you may find any or all of the above solutions cause your captures to stop recording and require a manual restart to complete. Feel free to PM me if you would like to discuss this further off forum.