What is Media Management in Final Cut Pro X?

hey everybody it's mark from rippletraining today we're releasing our brand new tutorial focused entirely on media management in final cut pro 10.4.9 it's an important subject that anybody who uses final cut needs to have a good grasp of we answer questions like where should i store my media when i'm starting a project should i transcode my media should i create optimized or proxy media what kind of proxy media what should i use to create my transcodes how can i make my library smaller how can i free up disk space how can i move my library from one location to another how can i share my projects with other editors we answer those questions and many more check out the link below it's on sale for a limited time today however i want to address this basic question what is media management and why should you care first let's talk about what media management is and why you might care about it for the purposes of this tutorial we're going to talk about two separate types of media management that are really independent of each other and when i say media i'm referring to any video audio or graphics that you use inside of final cut pro 10. the first type of media management refers to the physical location of that media it can be located either internally on your macbook your macbook pro your imac your mac pro or externally on a connected hard drive the other type of media management is the fonica pro 10 representation of that media in libraries in events and in projects these two types of media management are each extremely important and can be managed independently in other words you can change the physical location of your media without affecting where it is in final cut pro x and you can change where it is in final cut pro 10 without affecting its physical location let's look a little deeper at each of these types of media management the first thing you'll need to decide when editing the final cut pro 10 is where to store your physical media many people when they start out editing for the first time put all of their video clips audio and graphics on the internal drive or drives of their computer this does have certain benefits there's no additional cost if it's a laptop it's very portable and all new machines now have very fast solid state drives meaning that even very large media such as 4k material can play back on these drives with no problem however you are limited to the amount of storage that is inside your machine and you have no redundancy in case of a loss of data in addition you're asking your internal drive to both playback media and run the mac os the final cut pro application and any other open applications all at once which can cause playback issues especially on older machines while we usually recommend always using an external drive for your media it can be perfectly fine to use your internal drive for small projects most of the time however we recommend using external drives for storing your media for editing with final cut pro 10. small usb 3 and thunderbolt drives are relatively inexpensive very portable but can be slow especially if you're using usb 3 and generally recommend thunderbolt drives especially if you're working with 4k material although usb 3 can work especially if you're using optimizer proxy media which we'll talk about shortly you can get significantly more storage when using an external drive and then if you move up to a raid drive you get the advantage of redundancy as well as speed depending on how the raid drive is configured for any larger long format work documentary work feature film short film 4k work multicam projects we generally recommend that you use an external drive for the physical location of your media so why should you care about where you store your media well if you choose the wrong location number one you could run out of space right in the middle of a project or second you can have difficulty playing back in material because you chose a location that isn't fast enough or robust enough to be able to play back your project in final cut pro x once you've established your storage for your media you're also going to want a backup strategy while files that are camera cards can be backed up directly to a camera archive the media that you store either internally or on external devices will need to be backed up to additional devices as well one way i like to do that is using the application carbon copy cloner which will duplicate the contents of a drive to another location once you've decided on the physical location for your media you then need to figure out how you want to organize your media inside final cut pro 10. let's do a quick overview of the library hierarchy in final cut pro media and final cut pro x is organized first at the top level in libraries libraries contain events and events contain both media and projects we think of libraries as self-contained production units each library can represent a specific production that you're working on how you break up your productions into library units is really up to you events then you can think of as workspaces within a production unit a specific area of work for that particular production and the projects are the timelines the end result of what you build in your edit let's look at a couple of examples for a short film or even a feature the entire movie could be located in a single library although for a feature you may have a library for each reel but taking the example of a short film where the entire movie is held in the library each event in the library could be for that day shooting then the media for each of those days would be in each event also in each event would be the string out or first assembly the actual project for that day shooting another example is an episodic tv show where each library could be an entire season of the show and each event in the library a single episode within an episode you'd have all the footage for that episode as well as the projects related to that specific episode alternatively you could have a library for each single episode another example would be an event like a wedding where each wedding would have its own library and the events are the buckets within that library for each part of the wedding the preparations could be an event the ceremony could be the event and the reception and then within each event would be the video the photos the graphics the audio for that particular event as well as the timelines for that event or you could have an event that is dedicated holding timelines which include media stored in other events it's very easy to change your mind after you've established how you want to set up your libraries and events and where you want to store your media however it is very important and why should you care well if you haven't thought through where to store your media and you don't know where to find it you can end up with your media offline let's look at a couple of examples of ways that you can organize your media into libraries and events in final cut pro 10. here in final cut i have three open libraries the bottom one is called diving trips inside this library we have two events for two separate dive trips at two separate locations next we have a library called quintessa interviews it represents all the media for interviews that were shot at this winery on a particular date if i open that up we have events for each interview with each person notice that inside these events i have collections of folders keyword collections and smart collections that allows me to further organize the material within that event so you don't need to create many separate events when you have the ability to use these collections in order to organize your material and finally we have a library called fall productions inside are events for each separate production one called cupcake and one called the ghost of jerome and once again we have keyword collections allow us to organize material within each event as you'll see final cut pro is extremely flexible with how you organize your material and you can change your mind at any time so did you find this little primer helpful please leave us a comment below subscribe and we'll see you next time here on macbreak studio

Channel: Ripple Training

Views: 9,902

Keywords: Final Cut Pro, 10.4.9, Media, Proxy, Workflow, MediaManagement, Library, Events, Editing

Id: IHL9gFwm85M

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020