Events vs Libraries???

Question

Level 1

4 points

Events vs Libraries???

Having not done any regular editing since Final Cut Pro 2, you can imagine that FCP-X is a bit of a jump for me...I'm trying to understand the best way to import my content so that it is easily searchable, and need a hand to understand Events vs Libraries, and the best way forward for importing footage.

The situation is that I was the guy in my gang of friends who had the video camera, and recorded our lives and events over many years...trouble is, most of the original source footage is over 10 years old now, stuck on 200-300 MiniDV tapes, and my concern is that if I don't get the footage off soon, the original tapes will degrade and the footage will be lost forever.

So, what I'm trying to work out is "How do I best arrange this footage at capture?" Do I just have one big library, with defined events within? or is each distinct event to go into a library of its own? or, do I have no events at all and just a library full of tagged footage?

I want to be able to simply tag the footage at import so that I can simply do key word look ups e.g. "2002" will show me all footage from 2002..."40th Birthdays" will show all 40th birthday..."persons name" will show me all footage across the years of that person...etc In my experiments so far, the key word search doesn't seem to search across multiple events, so assuming I'm on the wrong path...?

So, keen to understand how I best search by tags and key words...? To do this, should I not set up any events at all and just have one big library full of footage that is tagged???

Appreciate any guidance the community can provide.

Cheers Rob G

Posted on Mar 29, 2018 11:39 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 30, 2018 1:38 AM in response to Nobster2107

You are talking about a massive amount of footage. Assuming 300 one-hour tapes, that will amount to about 4TB.

If you choose to have only one library with everything in it, the first thing to take note is to NOT store the imported footage inside the library. And, of course you’d need a very big drive to store it all.

But then you may start to think whether you need those tapes in their entirety - there are probably lots of useless footage where the camera was filming the floor etc. Of course going through all that is not easy but it may be worth taking the opportunity to filter through all that- a multiple months long endeavor, for sure.

Another concern: when importing FCP X will make new clips when there are breaks in the timecode, each tape possibly resulting in hundreds of short clips. If that is not what you want, but you’d rather want each tape come out as a single clip, use Quicktime Player to import the tapes.

Reply

Events vs Libraries???

Similar questions