Best practice question re. importing and scratch drive

Me personally for "important "footage

• Compressed disk image of the SD card using the Disk utility that gets offlined copied to a Firewire drive
• Deadicated, fast Media drive that I create an import archive for

I am just not a beliver in leaving things on the OSX drive. I actually go out of my way to move system swap to another drive. If you are getting slow studdering edits you may want to use the "Proxy Media" option that creates video file 1/4 the size but it uses the real files for export sharing.

Yes read your manual to understand more but here is a clip:

Create proxy media: This option creates video and still-image proxy files. Video is transcoded to the Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy) codec format, which provides high-quality files useful for offline editing at the original frame size, frame rate, and aspect ratio. Final Cut Pro creates medium-quality (one-quarter resolution) proxy versions that increase editing performance. Video proxy files take up considerably less disk space, which often means you can work on a portable computer instead of a desktop computer that has significantly more memory and processing power. Still images are transcoded to either JPEG (if the original file doesnʼt have alpha channel information) or PNG files (if the file has alpha channel information). Still-image proxy files facilitate faster processing and rendering when the original image is very large.

Note: When transcoding files, Final Cut Pro always retains the original media for future use. For more information about where to find original media, proxy media, and transcoded media files, see Where your media and project files are located.

When importing, if you choose NOT to copy the files, FCPx will place shortcuts (aliases) in the "Original Media" folder, thereby saving disk space.

While Preferences>Import is where you choose to import using Proxy files, Preferences>playback is where you choose between Proxy and Orig/Optimized for editing.

Although at this time, you are importing from your established scratch disk, in case you hadn't picked up on it, when importing, you have the option of choosing your target disk, and therefore placing your Events folder on your scratch disk. When creating projects, you have the same option.

I only mention it, because since we no longer choose our scratch disk in Preferences, making the choice at the start of import can easily be missed.

Another small detail is that if one has imported (new) without realizing the Events can be placed on a disk other than OS, its easy to move the Events folder to another disk right in the Events Browser.

Very good points and insight!