FCP X: What's your initial, clip-trimming workflow?

[laserbeam273]

I've loaded up many hours of footage onto my iMac, and thought it'd be good to convert it all to Prores for the colour quality advantages (correct me if this is a lie, as I'm not that fussed about render speed).

But now my HDD has gone from just over 200 GB to almost 900 GB, and it's a 1 TB HDD - basically I'm almost out. Much of my clips I don't want to keep, but I've found that FCP X doesn't delete that which I reject (again correct me if I'm wrong).

Which leads me to my question: How can I effectively trim my clips down, minimise hard drive usage (i.e. rejected clips are completely deleted), whilst maximising footage quality?

Raw footage is in 1080 MPEG-4 H.264, and I'm usually getting 1-2 hours, and trimming down to 1 min to 15 min with several (1-5) clips.

 

[laserbeam273]

I just tried trimming with Quicktime, and it transcodes it back to H.264 unfortunately, so that's not an option.

 

[bagelche]

I haven't done this in X yet, but I understand there are ways to consolidate your project a la the FCP7 Media Manager and keep only the footage you've already use--discarding all else.

This Ken Stone article may contain the info on how to do it.

Can't you also right click on a clip in the browser and move it to the trash? This would work for any clips you don't want at all.

 

[tekriter]

I'm interested in this as well. Most of my video consists of highlight videos for high school athletes. It's not unusual to have 10 or 12 hours of source material for a player that must be condensed to a five or ten minute video.

In the past, doing it in iMovie, I would end up with a seven minute video that clocked in at 100gb or so. All the excess footage was retained so that you could "revert to original" at any time.

That's great, but to keep the video in it's original format meant keeping all that excess file baggage. You could export it back to DV, but then you lose all your ability to change transitions, for instance.

I have just downloaded the trial version of Premiere Elements 10, and will be interested in seeing if it has the same problem.

 

[cgbier]

Start by only importing the clips you really need, and leave the rest in a Camera Archive. Turn off Optimize Clips in the properties or edit with proxy files.
That should save you a lot of space.

 

[laserbeam273]

Can't you also right click on a clip in the browser and move it to the trash? This would work for any clips you don't want at all.

"Move to trash" - command+backspace burns the entire clip, even if you've only selected a small segment.

Backspace just "rejects" it, which basically hides it from sight.

And delete does nothing.

Also tried leaving it as H.264, trimming it in FCP X (which really is just hiding the unwanted), then transcoding only a section, but it's transcoding the whole clip.

So, the way I see it, if you can't cope with giant file sizes your choices are:
1. Stuff ProRes
2. Go Proxy (how's this for quality? Any decrease compared to a full transcoding to ProRes? How much smaller file size?)
3. Trim outside of FCP X, then import and transcode

Still think they should let you completely delete sections of clips and keep the rest.

EDIT: Feedback sent on this

 

[laserbeam273]

I'm now wondering whether I'm wasting my time going for ProRes. The main reason why I'm interested in it is that Apple says effects, particularly colour filters and such, end up looking nicer with it. How true is this?

I'm thinking my computer will cope with editing H.264, it seems to handle everything else I throw at it.

Going to try spend more time learning about ProRes and transcoding, there's not heaps of information on it all. Seems like Apple has wiped a lot of their old info, and has now replaced it with the FCP X homepage.

 

[bagelche]

"Move to trash" - command+backspace burns the entire clip, even if you've only selected a small segment.

Correct. This is only useful if the whole clip is unwanted.

Also tried leaving it as H.264, trimming it in FCP X (which really is just hiding the unwanted), then transcoding only a section, but it's transcoding the whole clip.
Still think they should let you completely delete sections of clips and keep the rest.

Where is your source coming from? If from a camera, what kind of camera? If it is AVCHD, did you save the whole card folder structure to your local drive or are you just working off the raw video files? These things make a difference.

I'm not fond of FCPX's import from camera compared to 7's Log and Transfer, but if you're importing from a camera or the file structure of footage from a camera you can mark in/out points on your clips and bring in only those.

Separately, I believe you can consolidate or move your project and select only the footage in use and it will discard the other footage.

 

[laserbeam273]

Footage is from a GoPro, so no fancy folder structure here. It's all .mp4 H.264 files, for some reason (probably card format) they automatically break up into ~3.96 GB files.

Isn't consolidation for "Projects", not "Events"? And isn't it just moving files from multiple hard drives to a single hard drive?

But anyway, I've found a solution to this: What I could do is store all the raw footage as camera archives, and then I can work through and import the clips I want when I want to. I think that'd actually be a great set up, as I can realistically keep all my raw footage under the original coding, sample what I want when I want, and convert the clips I want to use into ProRes for improved editing.

Down-side is that I've already taken many hours off my camera, and I can't find a way to easily make an archive using it. So at the moment, I'm throwing the footage back on the camera, then using FCP X to turn it into an archive. Not a fast process!

EDIT: One concern I have about this is having the "eject" feature right by the archive. Considering this would become my only copy, it's a little concerning to be able to delete it with a single click... guess I just need to be careful.

EDIT #2: Never mind, eject doesn't delete the file, it just stops it being a currently viewing file.