Lost In Transition: Key Differences Between 7 and X - Part 2

Media Management

In FCP7, media could be located anywhere on your computer or external hard drive. Your desktop, your documents folder, anywhere. An editor could keep media very organized on an external disk... or could ignore organization and import media from any number of locations.

Don't forget where you set your scratch disk

When capturing or transcoding, an editor would have to set a scratch disk in which to place the media that was coming in. They have the freedom to save the scratch disk anywhere on a drive. The scratch disk is a global setting and not tied to a specific project. So if multiple editors are accessing the same machine but for different projects, you could easily end up saving the footage of one project into the scratch disk of another project. (This is an area that Adobe Premiere has a leg up on FCP7. The scratch disk is set when you create a new project. The scratch disk settings remain project specific no matter how many users are launching Adobe Premiere.)

Sometimes when a project becomes large and complex, media might get saved several folders deep on a drive. If any of this media gets thrown offline, sometimes FCP7 has a difficult time reconnecting back to it automatically.

FCPX takes a cue from Avid when it comes to media management. It wants to place all your media in one easy-to-find location. Each Event gets its own folder. When you import media into an event, FCPX saves your original media to a folder.

If you transcode to Pro Res 422 (optimized media) or to Pro Res 422 Proxy (proxy media) these copies of your media (that are created in the background, so there is no delay in your editing) are placed in their own subfolders within the Event folder. 

Each Event gets its own folder

Apple decided to make it easier for users to track their media. If you follow FCPX's media management protocols, then you never have to wonder where on your drive the footage is. It's always in your Final Cut Events folder. If ever you needed to move or copy your project's media, you would move or copy the Events folder and be done with it.

(Although: You would want to let FCPX handle a move like that. Thanks to its database structure, it can move and copy media fairly easily.) 

What did pros hate about this? The apparent lack of flexibility of where and how they get to organize their media. I say apparent because there is a way to have the best of both worlds (ie: you don't have to automatically import your footage into the events folder, instead relying on media aliases. I'll get to that in a future post.)

Metadata

Every NLE is technically a database. Every NLE has the capability of taking advantage of metadata - the technical or organizational details that can now be stored digitally within files or within a program.

I love the Inspector

FCPX is able to read the metadata that is stored on video files and audio files. If you receive footage without metadata inputted prior to reaching post production, you can input this metadata manually. Smart Collections can then be set to filter footage based on different metadata parameters. The more metadata entered before importing into FCPX, the faster a project can be organized.

Exporting

In FCP7 you can export your final edited sequence as a self-contained Quicktime file or to another format via Compressor. You can export with stereo tracks. You can export with discrete channels.You can export OMFs for a sound editor, export to Color for color correction, export XMLs to conform on another system. You can export to your heart's content! You can even... still... to this day... export to tape.

Export from FCP7

In FCPX you don't export. That's too cold a term. Instead... you share! You can share to quicktime as well as to Compressor or Motion. Apple added other sources you can share directly to (reflecting either their new target customer or just the reality of the new media landscape): You can share to YouTube, Vimeo, even CNN iReport. You cannot, however, export to tape.

Share from FCPX

You can export stereo audio channels, but on initial release, you could not export discrete channels (that has since changed, though it takes a new workflow to do so). You couldn't export XMLs at first; now you can export to FCPXML... which doesn't resolve issues many pros have with exporting XMLs since so few applications can import this new format natively. Did I mention you cannot export to tape?

Color no longer exists as its own application. Instead, color correction features were updated and built into the program.

Good luck exporting an OMF in version 10.0. But as we'll see later, this has been addressed, albeit in a whole new way that you have to wrap your head around at first. A trackless timeline calls for a trackless workflow.

What did pros hate about this? This was arguably the nail in the coffin for pros.

Sharing Projects & Multiple Editors

Sharing projects when editing with FCP7 is fairly simple. If another editor or if your director has a copy of a project's media on a back up drive, you simply email them your project file. They re-connect media to their file (unless, of course, the drives are cloned exactly, then the media will be re-connected right away) and go to work. If you are working across a network in which the media is saved in one place but being accessed by multiple editors, working in FCP7 is pretty straight forward.

FCPX, I believe, was initially built with single editor set-ups in mind. In fact, most tutorials online seem to be geared toward editors who shot their own footage or already familiar with the footage before loading it into X.

This is one of the reasons I wanted to see how it works with a feature. I'm hired to work with footage I'm not familiar with. Are FCPX's unique tools just as useful when I'm still discovering the footage for myself? How do I know how to tag something if I don't know if it's going to be useful or not?

I have skimmed stories in which editors have worked with X over a SAN. I need to look at those more closely. But I'm sure, like with everything that goes through a major change, you have to let go of how you used to do it and embrace a new workflow.