SPEED UP Your Workflow with these FCP Organization HACKS

let's talk about what is probably the least sexy Final Cut Pro topic media management if you are us time looking for footage images or other assets that are all over your hard drive if you're creating folders from scratch for every project to organize your files or you're not using roles or smart collections to your advantage then you are wasting time I'm here to help you to get your time back and these nine organization or workflow hacks from copying your footage off the SD card to backing up the final product are guaranteed to save you loads of time and speed up your workflow so stick around let's start with how I organize my folder structure on my hard drive I have a folder structured template setup and I've labeled it as triple Z what I always do is duplicate this folder using the shortcut command D and I'll hit return and rename it to the next number in the sequence in this case 186 and then the project name inside this folder I have the following folders admin this is where I store scripts ndas brand guidelines fonts or any other documents that are specific to this project next is audio and I have subfolders for dialogue if I record my audio separately like on a zoom recorder music and sound effects then I have an FCP folder with my Final Cut Pro Library template file and I'll show you how I set this up later in the video I'll always rename it to the name of the project next is my final exports folder which is pretty self-explanatory and then I have my footage folder where with my most common subfolders a73 screen recordings and stock footage for example depending on the project this might change for projects with multiple cameras I might change the folders to cam a cam b or for travel videos I'll break them up into day one day two Etc and each of those folders would have subfolders for different cameras then I have a graphics folder where I store all the project files and renders for any graphics that I might create in a different app and lastly I have a folder for images that I might use in my edit now there is a free app called post haste that allows you to organize your projects with customizable templates Dylan Bates actually spoke about it on my channel in a previous video which I'll link to down below if you'd like to go and check that out staying organized in finder makes it easier to organize your footage in FCP and it saves you time because you don't have to figure out where the files go for each project there's a set system that you can follow I'd recommend that you create your own customized folder structure that suits your needs now it's time to copy footage from your SD card to your computer or a hard drive by the way I use the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD and I highly recommend it as a working drive when you copy footage you will have noticed that you have this generic kind of numbering sequence and it looks different depending on the type of camera you use but C triple zero five means absolutely nothing to me so I like to rename all of my Clips I usually add descriptive words related to the folder that the footage is in like cam a or Cam b or day one day two GoPro audio Sr for screen recording Etc remember this because this ties in with one of my biggest time saving hacks inside Final Cut Pro later on if you you have a look at my footage from my month-long trip around Europe I have renamed each clip with the day the place and whether it was my camera or Donna's camera not only does this allow me to see where a clip comes from by just looking at the file name on the timeline it also helps me to organize my FCP Library faster more on that in a bit you can rename all of your footage by selecting all of the Clips in the folder right clicking on them selecting rename then select format type in a descriptive name with a space or an underscore at the end and finder will rename the Clips in sequence if you want to keep the original clip name you can just select the add text option to add your description at the beginning of that clip name now this works well but it does have a few limitations and I created an automated workflow that has a few extra options if you don't already know automator is an app that comes with Mac OS and it allows you to automate all sorts of tasks I set up this workflow to accept a bunch of files via drag and drop which it will then sort and rename one reason why I prefer using this workflow as opposed to the rename option in finder is because when shooting GoPro footage at different frame rates a clip name often changes and then sorting by name puts those clips out of sequential order but by using this workflow I can sort the clips by creation date and then maintain the order that the clips were shot in you can adjust these parameters as you see fit and when you hit run it will rename all of those files for you also if you are renaming multiple days of footage you don't have to retype the file name again you can just change the name from day one to Day 2 remove the files add the new ones and hit run again this alone has been a huge Time Saver for me over the years you can download the workflow using the link down below and my advice would be to save it somewhere where you won't accidentally move it maybe somewhere like your movies folder and then go to view customize toolbar and drag and drop it onto the find the window now the renamer workflow is easily accessible from any finder window okay so you've got all your footage renamed and you're ready to import it into Final Cut Pro usually I would just open my template and start importing footage but there are a few settings that you need to be aware of first so create a new library in Final Cut Pro and head over to Final Cut Pro preferences and under the import section you can choose to copy your imported files to the library storage location or to leave files in place I always have lead files in place selected because I organize all of my media in finder and I don't want Final Cut Pro to duplicate those files into the library file which then makes your library file hundreds of gigs I also want these two keyword options selected I turn off all of these analysis and transcoding options as well these settings will be applied to any and all Imports going forward let's set up an FCP Library template and this will be the file that you keep in your folder structure template so that when you duplicate it your Final Cut Pro Library template is duplicated as well I'll start by creating a new project using the shortcut command n I'll call it template and 4K 23.976 frames per second is fine I'll click on the index window over here and select roles and then edit roles here I will add a new role for each of my media types this will vary for you and the kind of projects you work on but let's add a new video role called b-roll and I can change the color here too I usually create a corresponding audio role which I'll call b-roll Audio and I'll match the colors you can do this for any and all roles that you might want to create my typical role setup for my YouTube videos looks like this and here is another example of a role setup for an Adventure film for a client as you can see for bigger projects you might have very specific roles set up but this role setup is my default for 90 of my projects if you want to do a deep dive on rolls then make sure you check out this video where I explain the power of roles but after this video of course don't worry I'll remind you at the end using events is another way to organize your footage you can rename events by hitting return and giving it a name you can create a new event using the shortcut option n you might want to use events to separate your footage your audio images project files Etc I don't usually use events in this way because if you click on the drop down arrow next to the smart collections folder you can filter the browser window by video files audio projects Etc more on Smart collections in a bit because they are super powerful too if I'm working on a YouTube video or a client project that isn't too crazy I will just store everything in one event for a larger project shot over multiple days I'll usually create an event for each shoot day if I'm working on client projects I might create an event for each video in that project for example when I work on courses I will have events for each stage of the production process like this I'll have a work in progress event where all of the assets will go but also where my initial timelines will start then a waiting for assets event where I move the project files to if I need something from the client in order to finish that video once I've exported for review I'll move the project into the in review event and finally the projects will move into the approved event when they're all done it makes it easy for me to see how many videos I still have to work on and at which stage of the production process they are right inside of Final Cut Pro foreign [Music] ful organization tools which I don't see people talking about that often on YouTube is smart collections smart collections allow you to filter the media in your Final Cut Pro Library using keywords or other parameters let me show you how it works and I'll give you a few of my common use cases for smart collections use the shortcut option command n to create a new smart collection you can also create one by going to file new library smart collection and for this example let's call it screen recordings I'll then double click on the gear icon and here I can choose the parameters for the smart collection I'll click on the plus icon and you'll see that you can filter by any one of these parameters I'll select text and then change all text to names and I'll make sure it includes the text Sr earlier I mentioned that you can rename your Clips with descriptive words like cam a b-roll or Sr for screen recordings and by doing that I can use Smart collections to filter my Clips in Final Cut Pro I'll close that up and now you can see I have the screen recording smart collection which will show all of my screen recordings I also like to use collections if I'm working with multicam footage I'll label the first camera cam a and the second camera can be I have Smart collection set up for both and in that case when I select cam a I can hit command a and select all of the files head over to my inspector and type the camera name in the inspector window I can do the same for cam B and doing this allows me to sync my multi-cam Clips a lot easier and a lot faster here's another example for a large project with 1.7 terabytes of footage this project was shot over multiple days with multiple cameras and I wanted to assign roles to each of the different clips so that it's easier to see which clip came from which camera so I created a smart collection for all GoPro clips and then by selecting the GoPro smart collection I can select one of the clips hit command a to select them all and and then right click to assign my GoPro audio and video roles to those clips sure you could just have your library selected and click on the magnifying glass and search for GoPro to find all the GoPro clips and then assign all the roles but if I ever need to go back and look for a specific GoPro clip in my browser window I can simply go ahead and click on the smart collection and I don't have to search for the GoPro Clips each time I want to do that hopefully these examples give you an idea on how powerful smart collections are and hopefully it also gives you some ideas on how you can incorporate smart collections into your workflow once you have set up your Final Cut Pro library to your liking with roles events and smart collections go ahead and save the template into the FCP folder in your finder folder template next time you're about to start a new project you can simply duplicate the folder and you'll duplicate that template as well foreign keywording is another great way to organize the media in your Final Cut Pro Library you can simply select a clip in the browser hit command K and then type in a few words separated by a comma that describe that clip you can also click on this down arrow and add a few keyword shortcuts or keywords that you use often then you can simply select the clip and hit Ctrl 1 2 or 3 all the way through 9 to add those commonly used keywords this is great because then you can simply click on the down arrow next to the event and quickly navigate to those keywords where only those clips will be selected and you can browse through those clips in your browser window another cool thing that you can do is tag your Clips in finder by right clicking on them and assigning a specific color maybe you want to mark all of your talking head footage red and all your b-roll green then when you drag that footage into your event those colored tags become keywords you can also rename them if you like in finder you can also add additional tags which you can name like stock footage for example and when you drag those clips into your project the stock footage tag becomes a keyword this might be useful if you have a library of Clips in finder that you often drag into new projects because by tagging them in finder they will always have those keywords when you import them into Final Cut Pro I'll be honest I don't use keywording all that often especially if I'm cranking out a YouTube video or doing a quick client video but on larger projects we're staying organized is absolutely essential then keywording can be really helpful I'm not going to do a breakdown of my entire editing workflow in this video because that would be a very long video on top of what is already a very long video but if you found the information in this video helpful and would like to see an edit breakdown video like that please let me know in the comments I will however give you a few tips to keep your library organized as you go through the editing process you might need to create multiple versions of an edit as you get feedback from a client or as you go through your editing process making revisions to your own videos I usually label all of my edits with version 1 at the end of the project name this way when I work on a cut down or make revisions to an edit I can simply select the project and hit command D to duplicate it and the duplicate will automatically be renamed to version 2. if you have any compound Clips or multi-cam Clips in your edit duplicating the project like this keeps them linked if you will meaning that if you open up a compound clip or a multi-cam clip and make changes in version 2 then will also make those changes in version one of your edit this is not necessarily a bad thing and I use this to my advantage all the time if I've duplicated a project with a compound clip of let's say a client logo then the client says to me please don't use that version of the logo rather use the white one I can simply open up the compound clip in one of the timelines update the logo and then that logo updates across all of the timelines where I have that compound clip alternatively you can choose to snapshot a project using the shortcut command shift d which will duplicate the project but a self-contained backup version is created where the compound clips and multi-cam clips are not linked so for example if I go into a project that I've snapshotted and I changed the color grade in the multicam clip if I go back to the original project that grade does not affect the multi-cam clip because there are now essentially two instances of that multicam flip in the library when your edit's done it's time to back up all of your media files and your project files and there are so many different options to choose from I ran a community poll recently to see what you guys do and a lot of you use multiple hard drives that's what I always used to do but when I moved to Portugal I didn't want to move with 20 hard drives so I was looking for a cloud-based solution backblaze is a popular option but I went with dropbox's unlimited plan and I've had a few requests to talk about my Dropbox workflow and why it works for me I was already using Dropbox to transfer footage with clients so it felt like a natural progression to upgrade to the unlimited plan this video is not sponsored by Dropbox by the way I'm just sharing my experience using Dropbox as my backup solution what I love about it is that everything works through the finer extension so by simply clicking on the Dropbox icon in my finder window I have access to all of my backups for example let's say I wanted to backup a recent YouTube video that I did it the first thing I would do is open up that project in Final Cut Pro select the library head over to file delete generated files and I will delete all of the render files and the optimized and proxy media if you've ever seen your library file size just blow up to like hundreds of gigs or even over a terabyte this is likely why unless you store your footage inside the Final Cut Pro Library file which we spoke about earlier once those files have been deleted I'll close the library and now that Library file is as small as it can be to back up that project I will copy the entire folder from my external hard drive into my Dropbox folder which is located on the internal drive on my MacBook Pro when the files are done uploading you will see a green tick to show that the files are synced to the cloud I'll then right click on the folder and select make online only to remove it from my hard drive online only files are shown with this gray cloud icon if I ever need to find old project files footage or anything else I can use Mac os's Spotlight to search for my files to find exactly what I'm looking for then I can simply right click on a file or folder and select make available offline to download those files it's not the cheapest solution because you have to pay for three team members on the advanced plan to get unlimited storage but I currently have about 60 terabytes in the cloud that I can access whenever I like and from wherever I like so to me it's worth the money and that pretty much sums up my file management process from copying footage off the SD card all the way to backing up the final project files I hope you found it helpful and I would love to hear more about your workflow and what systems you have in place to speed up your workflow so feel free to leave a comment down below because I'm sure that those comments will be helpful to other editors as well and don't forget you can download the free renaming workflow using the link down below and lastly check out my video on the power of roles next because if you're not using them yet you're missing out see ya

Channel: Brad West

Views: 18,708

Keywords: final cut pro x tutorial, final cut pro x, final cut pro tutorial, final cut pro x tutorial beginner, fcp, fcpx, media management fcp, fcpx media management, final cut pro media management, fcp roles, fcp smart collections, fcp events, fcpx library management, fcpx library vs event vs project, fcpx library too big, file renaming mac, file management final cut pro, final cut pro workflow hacks, final cut pro workflow, fcp hacks, fcp tips, fcp workflow, fcp workflow tutorial

Id: BrwKv4mtt6E

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023