New Workflow Suggestions, Internal or External Drive Editing ???

Greetings all I’ve recently purchased an 16” MBP M1 Max 2TB SSD as my old 27” iMac was long in the tooth & wasn’t able to edit 4K without proxies.  I have an OWC Thunder Bay 4 with 4 x 4tb drives in RAID 5 which is thunderbolt 2 which I managed to get working with an OWC TB4 to TB3 dock and a TB3 to TB2 Apple adaptor. 
I’m having timeline editing issues with Sony A7IV 4K XAVC S-I 4K files and suspect that my RAID drive is not cutting the mustard at write 328 MB/s & read 371 MB/s tested on Blackmagic speed test. 
With the ridiculous speed of the internal SSD my question is can I edit a project on the internal SSD and then simply archive the project on my RAID Drive ?  The other issue I have and suspect we all have is that now that I’m shooting in 4K my RAID drive is filling up fast and I need a workflow that lets me shoot lots of clips for a project and then once I have  finished the project I can delete all the files files but automatically keep the edited project files for re editing the project or for stock footage for later use. I would really appreciate any help with suggestions on workflow that may solve my problems. 

Cheers

Stu aka “The Stuminator”

I do all my editing on the 2TB SSD in my M1 Mac Mini with no problems.

Stuminator wrote:

...recently purchased an 16” MBP M1 Max 2TB SSD...OWC Thunder Bay 4 with 4 x 4tb drives in RAID 5 which is thunderbolt 2...having timeline editing issues with Sony A7IV 4K XAVC S-I 4K files and suspect that my RAID drive is not cutting the mustard at write 328 MB/s & read 371 MB/s tested on Blackmagic speed test...With the ridiculous speed of the internal SSD my question is can I edit a project on the internal SSD and then simply archive the project on my RAID Drive ? The other issue I have and suspect we all have is that now that I’m shooting in 4K my RAID drive is filling up fast and I need a workflow that lets me shoot lots of clips for a project and then once I have finished the project I can delete all the files files but automatically keep the edited project files for re editing the project or for stock footage for later use. I would really appreciate any help with suggestions on workflow that may solve my problems....

The Sony 4k XAVC S-I codec should be fairly smooth on the M1 Max -- if single cam. IO rate should not be an issue since the data rate for that codec (at 24 fps)  is 240 megabits/sec (about 30 megabytes/sec). 

RAID-5 typically has a write performance penalty, so it's often a good idea to have the FCP library on a separate SSD. The best approach is to import media using "leave files in place", not copy to library, then use the FCP library inspector to designate a storage location for cache on a separate SSD and also put the library itself there. The library will be quite small if the cache is external and if all media is imported with "leave files in place".

Make sure in FCP preferences that background rendering is turned off.

The 3rd-party utility Final Cut Library Manager is good for safely deleting extraneous files like render, optical flow analysis, etc. It has an optional feature well worth the price for exporting a .csv file showing the pathname to each one:  www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

For some tree-oriented formats, FCP will not allow import with "leave files in place". In that case it's a good idea to first rewrap those files using the 3rd-party utility EditReady before importing them to FCP:  hedge.video/editready/

Make sure all your files have globally unique filenames. If the camera restarts filenames at C0001.mp4, change that camera config. If the camera filename config is not sufficiently flexible, rename the files before import using Finder. If nothing else add a 5-digit incrementing serial number. Finder can do this. See Macmost "Using the Mac Batch Rename Tool":


When finished with a project, if you copy that to another library it can bring along only the files used to construct the timeline. However FCP will not trim those files -- if you use 5 sec of a 10 min clip, it must bring all 10 minutes. DaVinci Resolve has file trimming ability but it is buggy and can corrupt data in some cases.

The 3rd-party tool Works4X can do some types of "trimming" via XML. It's not trimming in the normal sense since the file ranges are re-rendered. It has some limitations such as doesn't work with multicam:  worx4.com

Before you import long clips you may only use a piece of, you can use Quicktime Player to trim those using "no-encode" methods. It can trim head and tail and using the CMD+Y "split" feature can segment the file, delete segments, re-order those, then save the result without re-encoding. So it's very fast and there is no generational quality loss. See the Macmost episode "Easily Trimming Video Files with Quicktime Player": 


You cannot easily trim or rename media files after importing to FCP. So it is very important to proceed in an organized, methodical manner. Do any re-wrapping, trimming, renaming, etc, before importing to FCP. 

Make sure you understand the difference between importing media with "copy to library" vs importing with "leave files in place". If you accidentally copy media files within the library, then edit those into a timeline, it is very difficult to get those files out of the library.

For details on FCP media management, see this Ripple Training tutorial. It is a commercial product but well worth it:
www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cu...ent-in-fcp-x-10-4-9/