How to organize 100 hours of rushes ?

mick1635 wrote:

How to organize 100 hours of rushes ?

smart.

First of all you have to accept that this is gonna be a time-consuming part of your project. I'm just saying this because there is no superfast option to organise your footage. I still think you'll be faster on FCPX than on any other NLE.

If you could give a hint what kind of project it is I may could give better advice but here is a starter:

I'd start with a more general Key wording before I go into details.

Then take your big parts and break them into more useful bits step by step.

Also Smart-keyword-collections would be a huge help to generally organise

your footage before going into detailed key wording.

Hope this helps.

Imho you should be downloading FCPX right now. As I said I don't see any other editing program that offers you such a easy, fast and powerful way to organise your footage. If you do not have any experience with FCPX the first days can be frustrating coming from FCP legacy. But keep on working with it and you'll be rewarded big time.

There are a lot of tutorials by now which explain FCPX from scratch. Look for ripple training or Ken stone or larry Jordan‘s page and be open for the new paradigm. It is really worth it.

Also http://www.fcp.co should be in your Safari Top Sites 🙂

There is an art to this, so we can only give you some pointers. Then you must think about your particular project and what makes sense.

For sake of simplicity, in FCPX, an Event is where you have your media stored. A project contains your edits. It references the event media, but does not duplicate it. A Project can use footage from multiple events. An event can be used in multiple projects.

First, for performance reasons, I would not put all 100 hours in a single event. (I would be interested in others opinions of this, as well.)

So I would think through how I would use the footage. I could just create events by the day I shot the footage. I could create an Event for each scene of a script. I could create an event for each topic in a documentary. If you are filming live events, like a sporting event, a political rally, etc. create a separate event for each logical event.

Within the Event you can keyword as others have mentioned. The key thing about keywording is that when you do a keyword search, it searches the current event, not all events. So you don't want to put yourself in the position where you need to hunt around in multiple events for a particular scene, if you can avoid it.

This is also assuming that this is all your personal editing. There are very sophisticated ways of creating events if you need to share among many creatives.

in addendum to my not-so-seriously-meant first reply .....

think of FCPX as a data-base. don't manually sort your rushes (by renaming files, nor putting it into folders), use in extenso the options to keyword/tag/describe the clips, use the meta-infos.

nobody does know the nature of your project - therefor my sassy first post:

did a unit-manager/script-girl wrote a take-list, is it about a scripted movie or a documentairy, is original soundtrack of any importance, or will you use a narrator, ....

try to imagine how you will use later the clips, what info is important, what not.

and, again: use tags, no drawers ... 😉

Karsten Schlüter wrote:

.... don't manually sort your rushes (by renaming files, nor putting it into folders), use in extenso the options to keyword/tag/describe the clips, use the meta-infos.

And here, I don't agree 100%! If you have your footage managed in folders by day/camera/location etc, FCPX can automatically add those folder names as Keywords during import! (Unless your footage is SDHC/SxS/P2 cards copied over, in which case I have not managed to have it add those keywords..)

So some Finder organization can be a benefit!

Jakob Peterhänsel wrote:

… So some Finder organization can be a benefit!

… can be benefit, can not, it really depends on WHAT you are doing:

• recording in nature, gives same date, same cam, same media - but different birdies

• recording The Story of my Life, gives diff. date, diff. cam, diff. media - but same person

• recording a movie, makes all these technical data mostly obsolete, 'take' could be more important ....

diff. projects => diff. sorting schemes .. and I think, we can both agree:

a computer search'n finds faster than any human hand … 😁

Karsten Schlüter wrote:

diff. projects => diff. sorting schemes .. and I think, we can both agree:

a computer search'n finds faster than any human hand … 😁

Totally agree - that is also why I had to note that importing thousands of clips, might help if they are somewhat organized in folders, as the folders become keywords during import = faster tagging/searching.

Karsten,

If the OP has 100 hours of rushes, I would guess that is somewhere between 3 and 5 Terabytes in ProRes.

Are you suggesting that he put 5 terabytes in a single event, and then navigate through keywords?

I don't know the answer. I am just trying to understand.

Thanks!

AppleMan1958 wrote:

… in a single event, and then navigate through keywords?

I don't know the answer. I am just trying to understand.

I just tried to suggest that there is much, much, much more to organize than just doing 'folders'.

A year of my soccer recordings is about ~2TB either (but in diff. Events, I have to confess), no prob for FCPX - and for my no-budget hardware!

.... I got 'sensitized' when PC-friends proudly showed me there music-Libraries .... all handcrafted, matryoshka-esk folders-in-folders-in ... demoing how simple iTunes creates specific playlists by using tags&keywords made them speechless .. 😉

smart tagging alllows to find a specific sentence, a specific 'face', a specific stunt with a single click. And you're not limited in FCPX by a few tech. data (timestamp for example), but it starts with simple 'favorite-ising' and 'find people' (which, partly, works incredible precise!), and ends with your dozen, very own criteria, you can combine and mix as you like. And need.-

... and due to its data-base character of FCPX, size of media shouldn't matter ... imho. 😎