Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

9 points

Initial steps to create a video

Hi guys,

Say I have four MP4s I want to cut into a movie. I am perpetually confused about Events, Projects and Libraries.

Ideally after I have made the edits, there is no residue of the operations left on my wife's MBP. Yes ideally my edits were saved into a small file in the case I wanted to make an adjustment in the future (unlikely). Would be wonderful to store that "edit file" in the same directory as my working media, but I have not figured that out.

I made a video describing my poor workflow atm: https://youtu.be/gi7YqXHx9eQ

Like what is the way to get a clip quickly in the time line?

Any other resources to streamline FCPX in my case... would be super grateful.

iPhoto '11

Posted on Nov 25, 2015 7:53 PM

Best reply

Alchroma

Level 7

23,809 points

Posted on Nov 26, 2015 1:52 AM

In short, Libraries are the primary container, Events are imported through the import process to specific Library.

Once an Event/s (clips ,stills, audio etc.) is imported you start work.

You MUST create a New Project at this point and edit your media into the Project in the Timeline.

Note: You can open a clip into the Timeline and think you are editing a Project, WRONG, that's why you can't find your work.

Projects look like this:

this

this; depending on how stuff is selected. The common denominator is the Clapper Board icon.

Regards the yellow border on clips, that determines what part will be edited to the Timeline, in/out points in other words.

Clear Ranges (in/outs) if unwanted

Getting clips from Browser to Timeline use the E key to Append, W to Insert, D to Overwrite:

Hope this assists getting you started !!

View in context

16 replies

Nov 28, 2015 6:46 PM in response to hendry78

Let me first go out of my way to stress that I don't mean this in any sort of aggressive or rude way, but I suggested letting FCPX put the media into the Library to make the archiving process simpler and more foolproof. From your OP it was sounding like everything was too hard. Now I can see you want to check your video project into a source code versioning repository, so simplicity is not the priority I thought it was.

It might work if you kept the media external and explained in a readme that whoever uses it will have to fix the symlinks to the media, then edit. But ... it's sure not what the product was designed to be used for and this is Apple - they will break any part of the Library structure at no notice if they feel it will improve the product and people who depend on reverse-engineered Library features will get no sympathy.

The XML is intended for interchange with other apps (colour grade and audio mix primarily) and I'm not up to speed on whether it actually does preserve the full, er, "goodness" (i.e. some fancy stuff may be lost) at the moment. I know in the *very* early days you would lose some stuff in the XML, but maybe by now it's a full representation. It is, at least, a documented feature so unlikely to get broken.

There are commerical MAMs that use XML and the media to manage project sharing/versioning/collaboration. Again, I'm not terribly current, but Cantemo certainly used to mention their strong FCPX integration.

Sure, it might be crufty, but the app really presumes a filesystem. If you want it all in S3 buckets, try DropBox*. Sharing with colleagues to date is more via SAN/NAS/external drive or some folks have been doing it with disk images. Xsan/external drives handle arbitrating who's able to write to the project, the others I'm not so sure.

*I haven't, as I said there's symlinks and voodoo so it may not survive. There's an old LACPUG movie online showing using DropBox and the (much less elegant) 10.x "event" structure to share a project. Was very much a hack, but one that they got to work

Initial steps to create a video