Trying to understand PROJECTS in 10.1, can someone please help?

I agree. Tom missed your point completely.

That said, FCP 10.1 is organized to enable what you want to do, at least as you've expressed it. In some ways this represents a bad and very frustrating design choice that makes it impossible for me to organize projects the way I'd like, even within events. In other ways it simplifies the relationship between events and libraries, making it much easier to collaborate, move libraries around, and archive libraries that aren't being used any more as self-contained units.

In some ways this is a multi-layer vocabulary foobar that I've mentally resolved as follows:

1 - a "library" is really a collection of projects and their related media (notice the bias of my vocabulary; media and projects are interrelated, and is like that element of the new FCP design, but once the media are collected, the projects are the thing that needs to be obvious). I'm completely OK with this, but it makes it hard to do what you want without created a super-library manager that can find all your projects in all your libraries and display them together. I don't think anything in the current FCP enables such display.

2 - an "event" is a subset collection of media (video, audio, picture, text, etc) and projects within a library. An event can also contain folders, keyword collections, and smart collections, all of which appear to have been implemented with an eye to organizing media rather than projects. That's important to most kinds of complex video editing, so I understand why the focus has been there. Actually, it may work well for you have something like one or a few projects per event. It doesn't work well for me, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

3 - a "project" is a multi-track sequence of media. That's fine with me, but ... Projects are buried in with media in a way that makes both harder to manage. That burial is what leads to your question in the first place. Projects are much too hard to find now, even positioned at the top of the list of everything in an event. To put this in context, I typically record concerts. That generally entails four video tracks from different camerFinal cut 10.1 hangs machineas/angles, one dedicated audio track, and supporting pictures and text (and very little of those). At most I import fifteen or twenty data elements. I then create upwards of twelve projects. The first project brings all the tracks together for the whole concert. I use that to synchronize the tracks using the audio track. Once that's done I cut it into performances (compositions or movements thereof). The performances are then copied into distinct projects. A concert I'm editing at the moment contains roughly 25 performances (ideally 26 projects). My problem, which is a subset of yours, is organizing those projects within the event that contains all the concert media. In my ideal world I would the event would break out into a media folder and a projects folder and I could use child folders to organize projects into a workflow that allowed me to MOVE projects from pending to active to done. This is how I organized things (without the library or event containers) before 10.1. Support for this appears to be absent in FCP 10.1.

But perhaps I've missed something.

You can filter the whole library for projects. You can put all your projects in a single event in the library.

Yes, Tom. That was plainly obvious from the way FCP 10.1 disorganized my projects during the update process. All of the workflow related hierarchical structure that I had created was blown up and flattened. The first thing I did after the update was to read up on the new model. I get the advantages of the new "event-oriented" library model and immediately recognized that I would want to move events and their related projects into discrete libraries that represented what I've called super projects and an object oriented system would normally call a project. In that model an FCP library is a project, an FCP event is a class, and an FCP project is a method. It's a very clean model in many ways, but the vocabulary it's foobar for both experienced video editors and object oriented programmers. Projects and the central role of projects to workflow just haven't been given enough thought.

The first thing I did after getting my head around the new system was to move all my projects into their associated events so I could cleanly move events into related appropriate libraries. This aspect of the new system is great, as it is now much easier to move an entire group of related projects and media to another drive.

The second thing I did was to try to create a workflow organization. That is much more difficult, in part because folders have rendered useless an there is no concept of hierarchy. The only vaguely hierarchical structure (there's one level of hierarchy) that accepts projects are keyword collections, and while keyword collections accept projects, a project can only be copied (not moved). You cannot delete a project from a keyword group without deleting the project altogether, and that doesn't change when ( as you suggest) I put my projects in an event of projects. That's a bad idea anyway, as it constrains your ability to move events (as a collection of projects and media) from one library to another.

The right idea is to make folders work as collections of projects and other folders again, but within events, and with move functionality. Keyword collections weren't designed for projects in any case (they were designed for media).

I'll be honest. I HATE media libraries and have been avoiding systems that use them for years for both video and photo editing systems. The mere presence of a library has caused me to run away from several editing systems. I'm already inside FCP, so I'm not rushing away, and there are advantages to the incomplete "object model" that has been implemented. It remains that file systems are strong on organizational capabilities and offer cross system flexibility that proprietary product-focused libraries do not. If this hierarchical project workflow issue doesn't resolve I'll probably move to a different editing system that supports what I need.

If you want to delete the project from a keyword collection you don't delete the project, you delete the keyword from the project.

I think this library structure is much more flexible than you think. The library itself needs to be no more than a metadata container, with a few render files.

Yes, Tom. Certain kinds of flexibility are built into the system. Other kinds aren't.

Before I say more, thanks for the pointer to the keyword delete capability. It non-obvious (I'd looked for delete or manage keywords before with success). It should be located on the media and project pop-up menu rather than the function bar (it's a verb rather than a context).

It remains that There is no concept analogous to hierarchical folders in the system. I can misuse keyword collections, which are supposed to be used for identifying media that have specific elements, to identify groups of projects. I can put keyword collections into a single level of folders (say "media" and "projects"). Indeed, I have done so as a workaround for the now missing folder of projects capability, but keyword collections don't support hierarchy, I can't fool the system into a combination of folders and keyword collections that is provides a depth greater than one, and keyword collections don't act like folders.

And yes, I can, having copied a project from pending to active, select the project, bring up the keyword editor, delete the keyword "pending", confirm the operation, and close the keyword editor, but that sequence turns what used to be a simple drag and drop between folders into a multi-step kludge. A manage keywords option on the project pop-up men would make the functionality more obvious, but the result would still be a multi step kludge.

And yes, I can externalize almost everything from an event or even a library, but that defeats the whole purpose of libraries (even the simple file system-based library structures that people constructed to organize media in prior versions of FCP). Keeping all your media and projects together is a good thing. Tying projects more closely to the events they sequence is a good thing. A multi-dimensional approach to organizing clips (keyword collections) is a good thing for making is easier to find media when you have thousands of pieces to keep track of. But none of that required a proprietary library system that broke the most important organizational structure for projects in prior versions of FCP: hierarchical folders that act like file system folders.

I doubt this is a new objection. Indeed, I'm sure that a visionary system architect argued endlessly in requirements and design meetings that keyword collections provided a more flexible capability than folders and that they could be used projects as well as media, especially in a system that supports compound and multi-camera clips such that the product of a project can be treated as media for larger projects. I've sat in such meetings. I've heard and sometimes made such arguments. It remains that hierarchical folders are a simpler and more powerful solution for managing projects. I look forward to restoration of the functionality.

You have your opinion, but I think you should learn how to use the application. It's not complicated to apply a keyword. One simple way is to drag the selection into the keyword collection.

Many people, especially professionals collaborating with others or using multiple applications, strongly recommend working with external media and not managed media.

If the application doesn't suit you, you should find another that does.

I don't know your relationship to the product or to Apple, Tom, but you should back up a little bit. You are clearly an expert who has helped a lot of people (103k points is impressive). I'm a paying customer of FCP through several versions. My posts clearly demonstrate that I know how to use the product. They also show that I'm pretty frustrated with the product at the moment. I've explained some of the reasons for that frustration in this thread. I've made what seem to me to be some pretty straightforward suggestions that would bring the product a little closer to it's prior levels of intuitiveness and usability without damaging its new keyword model. This isn't the point at which you dismiss what I've said as an opinion and tell me to look elsewhere. This is the point where you say "I understand that this element of your established FCP workflow is more difficult than it used to be. Here's how you can pass your suggestions to the product team."

While we're at it, how about taking a look at the really frustrating problem I have with rendering. I'd think it would rate a "I think you may have found a bug. Here's how you report it to the product team. It should be easy for an expert like you to find.

"Final cut 10.1 hangs machine while rendering"

You report a bug using feedback, which you can access from the Final Cut Pro menu.