How to organise footage, folders and libraries for Final Cut Pro X

hey friends when I started filming and editing video I got in a right mess with all of my footage my files my Final Cut libraries events projects I didn't know what to do and over the course of the last year I think I have come up with a good system that works well for me so today I'm going to show you how I organize my footage on my hard drives and then how I manage getting them into Final Cut and how I manage my libraries so hopefully you can avoid the mistakes that I made so let's do this so before I get into it a couple of caveats like I said in the intro I'm not saying that this is the best way of doing this this is the way that I have developed for myself through trial and error so if you think there is a better way of doing this then please drop me a comment down below I would love to hear if I am doing something that you don't agree with or if there is a better way I've certainly found through trial and error that these are a couple of techniques which I've used just to kind of keep my sanity when editing and make sure that I know where to find things and that my files are well looked after what we're going to do is we're going to dive into the screen and I'm just going to roughly go through what I do for each new film project that I undertake first thing let's imagine that I've done a one day shoot for someone some sort of imaginary project the first thing that I do when I get back with my camera is I create a folder on my hard drive and that let's just call that imaginary project so this is kind of the the master folder for everything okay and then inside that I create another folder called footage okay so in this folder I'm going to create another folder for each camera that I've used for the shoot so in this instance let's say that I used my 100 d for the shoot and then let's imagine that I also used the 100 d and then that's also imagine that I used the 7d and you know let's just go wild let's say that I also used GoPro and then perhaps I had an audio source from the zoom h1 so now I would take all the memory cards out of the cameras and download the footage into their respective folders then perhaps I would also have anything that wasn't recorded so I would sort of have an assets folder in here and in here I might have background music and maybe some sound effects so I would find those things some of those things to be fair I might not have right now I might actually be in the edit before I'm deciding about sound effects or I might shortlist a few tracks that might work in the Edit and I might put them in there in advance but really the most important bit this stage is the footage keeping that tidy at this stage this is now where I would create my Final Cut library now before I get into that let's talk about Final Cut libraries ok Apple photos or iPhoto as it used to be called you just have one library don't you and that's where you put all your family photos and stuff like that so I'm used to that and iTunes you have a music library you just have one library and you keep all of your music in that so I'm used to that Final Cut libraries if you don't create a library for every project and you try and use them in this where's photos or iTunes you're going to get in real mess very quickly and that's exactly what I did I was sort of 15 vlogs into my YouTube channel had all of this footage all in one library my computer was nearly falling over the fan was sanded like the thing was going to take off and I realized that actually I made a massive error so let me save you the same mistake every single project that you do every sort of you know whether it be for a client or whether it's a personal project like a YouTube channel or whatever and create a new library for every single kind of final piece of output that you're going to create you I want to call it a project but that gets really confusing because within a library you have more projects and events and stuff but when I'm talking about a project at this point right now I'm talking about that music video that you're making or that set of interviews that you're doing or that YouTube video that you're making I'm talking about the project as a whole so for each main project that you do create a new Final Cut library and what I would do is I would put that library in this project folder that you've created on your hard drive ok so we are just going to go into Final Cut now and we're going to say file new and we're going to say new library ok and we're going to call it imaginary project ok and where am I going to put that I'm going to put it in my imaginary project folder that I've already created ok so now I have got this library called imaginary project and in here we have got just an empty event ok that it automatically creates for you and you've got your smart collections which I'm not going to get into in this video now this is where it gets tricky for the sake of demonstration because I can't actually import those folders because they haven't actually got any video in so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into a different library that I created recently for a project I was doing which was a sort of music video so if we come into here what we've got is this is where I would drag those folders in and what you see here is in this footage event which I created if I open that what I end up with is all of the folders from my folder structure that I've created in finder so we've got the canon 7d the 100 d 700d i shot some stuff on an iPhone 6 plus and on an 8 plus and then we've got some other assets admittedly this did get a little messy towards the end of the edit but you get the idea and that means if I want to look at everything that was used I can click on the event or I can look just for my audio files leave some sound effects that I added halfway through the project and then we've got the individual cameras so if you drag a folder from your file structure here like say I want to do 100 d fridge if I drag that into an event then it will keep the folders which is really handy then so that one event is kind of all raw footage so that's one event that I've called footage now if we look at my imaginary project here Final Cut already creates us an event with the days date on it what I normally do is I hit enter on that and I call that footage so that's now matching the folder structure that I've created on my hard drive and then within that footage same as you can see in this library there's all my different sources sound cameras etc I said after that I then create another event so for example this particular project I was shooting with so many cameras so once you've got your footage into Final Cut you want to sync all of those Clips up so therefore I've then created another event just to drop the multicam clips into so you could like when you create a compound clip you could also create an event and call it compound clips if it was going to be helpful to you as I said before I'm not saying that this is the best way trying to give you some ideas as to how you can keep track of your footage throughout these projects as well so then finally I create another event called projects and this is where I keep my actual edits this is where all of the projects live so you could put you could put you know projects in the footage folder or in the multicam folder and event sorry but I like to keep all of the projects in an event called projects it just makes good sense to me and I'm not good at remembering where I put things so if I've got an event called projects and there's pretty good chance I'm going to know where to look when I open this in a couple of months time and I'm looking for something one other thing to consider is in your library any library if you look at the info for a library over on the right-hand side here you can look you can see where things are stored so we've got the media is all stored in the library emotion content is stored in the motion templates folder you can choose to keep that in the library too and that's a good idea if you're using lots of it and then you've got cash in library and the backups is in the actual Final Cut backups which is on your computer so that's what I use and the reason I do that means that when I'm finished with a project because this is what happens with Final Cut you've got all of this video you've got gigabytes of footage and then when you put it all into Final Cut you end up with loads more then it creates all of the optimized media and all of this extra stuff on top of that so you end up with loads loads of gigabytes worth of video just for one sort of project so in order for lots of long-term storage the way that I've come up with of doing it is once I finished that project I will leave everything for three or four months especially if there's a client involved I would just keep everything and then if there's any changes that come back or further work that develops that they want to use then I have still got everything as it was if I have to say six months that project is definitely finished with it's all over and done with what I will then do is I'll come back into my finder here and I'll actually delete the original footage folder here and get rid of all of that because it's all in this project folder so it's all in the library so then I can get rid of all of that so that's sort of half of the space done already and saved the footage is still there I'm not actually deleting the footage and just deleting the original footage all of the footage is still accessible in its original format and full resolution in the Final Cut library and then when I'm really sure that it's done with I will open the library and I will say file and I will say delete generated library files and in there I will delete the render files all of them I'll also delete the optimized media and if I've created it I would delete the proxy media now all of these files are created by Final Cut on the fly in order to produce your finished timeline that you're working on some of them are necessary like if you're using text over a video it actually has to render that in order to show you what it looks like and in doing that it is creating a new file to show you but any of the sort of optimized media in the proxy media that is just there to help your workflow and speed up your workflow so you don't need any of it if you're finished and secondly all of that can be regenerated so if I delete all of that if there was a lot of stuff in this library it would dramatically reduce the amount of file size that that library takes up and if in the future I do need to reuse a project or a timeline within this library when I open the library Final Cut will fire up and regenerate all of those assets it can take a little bit of time that's why I only tend to do it when I'm really sure that I'm sort of done with something but what I found is this saves a huge amount of hard drive space and what it means is when I'm completely finished with a project all I end up with is one final cut library that's named sensibly in a folder that's named after the project and that just keeps it really simple for me now some people would delete everything and others would say oh no you need to save everything it's also worth mentioning that what I haven't talked about today is any kind of backup solution so all of the files that I'm using are on a system that is backed up and I'm currently working on a sort of off-site backup solution as well so not nothing I've mentioned today is in any way we're placing or negating the need for you know backing up your files this is just how I'm organizing it that's probably enough for today I feel like I've sort of gone on about it a little bit really so yeah I hope that was helpful it took me about a year to kind of get my head around this figure it out and stop making really stupid decisions about where files live how I'm organizing libraries and how to move them around how to store them my hard drives were filling up like crazy my computer was moaning at me a lot so hopefully I have saved you some of that headache and if there's a few tips in there that you find useful then I would love to hear so please drop me a comment down below and other than that I upload regular videos about cameras photography filmmaking my general journey as I learn about videography and filmmaking I'd love if you wanted to join me along on that journey please subscribe to the channel you'll get notified when I next upload a video and other than that I will see you next time bye [Music] hello [Music]

Channel: Will Chidlow

Views: 164,310

Keywords: organising files in final cut pro, final cut file management, using libraries and events fcpx, using libraries and events in final cut, organising video files, how to oganise footage in final cut, final cut library manager, final cut pro x media management, organising finalcut pro x, fcpx file management, fcpx file structure, will chidlow, final cut tips, How to organise footage, Final Cut Pro x

Id: azQaz_8N5yU

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018