Final Cut Pro: Importing files, preserving Finder folders

A core design principle of FCP is deep database integration, combined with the ultra-fast skimmer that allows rapidly browsing imported content, marking and classifying material on the fly.

Once the speed and power of these features are understood, it can be faster to do most of your organizing (inc'l range-based rating & tagging) inside FCP, not outside.

This is different from previous editors which had such poor database capability that extensive folder-level organization was the only choice. However, folder-level organizing is very limited: a clip can only be in one folder unless it's duplicated.

What if a long clip at the beginning has people crying, the middle of it has a child smiling, and the end of the clip has people hugging and laughing? Does it go in the folder labeled crying, or kids, or happy? With FCP's range-based keywords, you can tag specific ranges within such clips, then find them using the search tools.

Accepting and harnessing this method avoids redundantly browsing and organizing content outside, then again inside the editor. No external tool is as fast as the skimmer, and inside FCP, the full database power can be leveraged, including range-based keywords, ratings, and smart collections.

Another issue is the paradigm mismatch between organizing by hierarchical folders vs the FCP database-oriented method. Just like a relational database, FCP is not designed to replicate a hierarchical folder tree once imported. Rather than think of imported content as a tree, think of it as a database that you query according to tags that you apply. It has been this way since FCPX was released 15 years ago.

In YouTube, if you query on "One Smart Collection to Rule Them All," this shows one way to leverage the FCP database system.

To add a little bit to terryb's reply:

For the sake of an example, let's say your hierarchy is

A > B > C > file.mov

If you import folder A, and, as terryb syggested, you assign keywords based on Finder folders, then your file.mov will be imported with all the keywords "A", "B" and "C". Now this does not exactly replicate the Finder folder structure, but you CAN still do it, relatively easily.

Final Cut Pro also has "Folders", but unlike in Finder you don't put clips in there; you put keyword and/or smart collections.

• Create in FCP a hierarchy of folders, mimicking your Finder hierarchy, say A>B (or A>B>C, but
• see below)
• Create a smart collection C comprising all clips that have keyword A, B and C
• Put that smart collection in folder B

Now all your clips from subfolder C are here:

FCP can create keywords based on your folder names and/or Finder tags, but it doesn't create the same Finder folder hierarchy.

Organize files during import into Final Cut Pro for Mac - Apple Support

Final Cut Pro is strongly based in metadata. If you import a “landscape” folder, you can have all these clips automatically tagged with the “landscape” keyword. Keyword collections and Smart collections (besides events) are the tools FCP uses for organizing media in the browser.

There is no facility for having folders of clips, only folders of collections.

It also irked me at first, but when I learned how to use keywords and smart collections I loved them.

The thing is you organize your clips by metadata, not in folders or “bins” as in legacy FCP.

What I described is merely a way to try and mimic the Finder structure, but it is not mandatory nor is something that I use (in fact I don’t think I have ever used folders in FCP).

Once you wrap your head around FCP's organizational tools, you'll wish the Finder worked that way. LOL