best way to organize video? Finder vs Photos vs iMovie vs Final Cut Pro

I'm in the same boat- I really only need to manage/categorize/name my video files of family home movies. Edited professional projects are a whole other matter. I'll be mainly shooting 4K video with my camcorder, but it would be great to mix in other videos and formats from iPhone etc. If I want to play multiple clips in a stream/timeline (like a holiday or event) can I highlight a few dozen clips to play through? What do serious home movie enthusiasts do for management?

Also, I'd keep all the footage on an external hard drive- is there a way to backup the first hard drive occasionally by automatically importing only the new shots?

Thanks!

Shmanzoid wrote:

.."can I highlight a few dozen clips to play through? What do serious home movie enthusiasts do for management?"

Well NLEs like iMovie are the way to convert a set of short clips into a movie. If you want to play a sequence of movies automatically yo can join them together using Quicktime Player or put them in iTunes and make a playlist.

.."is there a way to backup the first hard drive occasionally by automatically importing only the new shots?"

Yes, apps like Superduper and Carbon Copy Cloner can produce clone backups and can be set to update the backup by only changing what is necessary.

Geoff.

I'm probably in a minority but I prefer to organise video and stills in my own folder structure on an external disk using the Finder rather than relying on Apple application libraries which have a habit of changing format between versions and seem IMHO to be unnecessarily complicated and worse still are not well documented.

This way my media are not affected by OS and application changes. I have my own archive with subfolders for each shoot date which contain material in a variety of formats from different cameras. I use external media in FCP X to avoid having it duplicate the media. I find Spotlight and Quicklook in the Finder are quite sufficient for finding and previewing media. If I want to do some editing I open the file in whatever application I want and save the result with a modified name in the same archive. Of course the archive is backed-up on a separate drive.

Geoff.

I actually use iTunes, and so the material is there for sharing to other devices as well.

There's a Home Movies category in iTunes for such material, and with that you have all the possibilities of tagging and keywording that are additional to the bare file data available in the Finder. That's the principal advantage: more way to classify and categorise than offered by the Finder, plus more ways to search too.

Getting material in is easy, getting it out is easy. If you spend about 3 minutes looking at the Library folder it's very obvious how it is set up, so even if you lost the app you can still effortlessly recover the actual files.

My iTunes Library has in excess of 30k items - music, tv, film and home video - and regardless of what folks say, I've simply never had an issue updating from one version to the next.

It lives on an external disk and is backed up to a couple of others.

For me, the issue with apps like iMovie and FCP is that these libraries are really for storing footage for editing projects, rather than finished work. So the options for things like sharing to devices are limited in them. Photos is a Photo app and won't import all video types. It's optimised for material from phones and family cameras. Plus, if you use iCloud Photo Library your storage requirement will increase and rapidly.

In my opinion its important to distinguish between the storage of raw media straight from a camera or other device and the storage of finished items (shared movies, edited still photos, music).

In the case of raw media there is no single application that will do all the different kinds of editing I need to do so I want to avoid having everything in a library attached to a single app. I'd rather have all material connected to a particular subject/project/event/shoot in a variety of formats grouped together in Finder folders. This is what I was thinking of in my previous post

In the case of finished items, it is more important to be able to share to other people and devices. For that iTunes is quite a good choice since it encompasses all types of media.

Geoff.