FCP wants to scatter my media files everywhere - should I force it not to?
Hey,
We're an up and coming church starting with FCP on a couple of machines here, and before we make too many projects I'd like for us to make our naming and storing conventions consistent. So I wrote down what I thought would be a decent system - it basically looks like this:
-YYYY-MM-DD Project Name
---Sources
-----Capture scratch
-----Audio (like music)
---Processing
-----Video
-----Audio
---Exports
------YYYY-MM-DD Description.mov
---Project.fcp
(All of these are folders except italics which represent sample filenames)
For me, it really seems logical to keep all of the media source files and my project file in the same folder. In my mind, this has several benefits:
- It's easy to backup
- It's easy to look at a glance to see how much disk space a given project is using
- If I need to take my project and go edit on another machine, I can grab my folder and know I have everything
Also, I tend to work with a finder window open in the folder where my project files are in. This way, as I create new files I can see them all and quickly open them in different applications (because each Application's "import" dialogs typically defaults to a different folder, and I spend all day navigating to my project folder in all these applications). I like having the Finder window open - I can see everything, get a sense for what junk is laying around, see at a glance if something is off, etc.
But Final Cut insists on setting your scratch disks as a per-system setting - spreading your media project files all over creation (your render files, waveform cache, and capture scratch files are nowhere near each other - you have to navigate outside of each one's project folder to get to the other one), and I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding the benefits in this. One might be the assumption that after you finish a project that you're going to delete your caches and capture scratch, but this is rarely the case for me (for a number of reasons – a biggie is that we have ~1.5TB of space). But even so - I still don't understand why you would separate all of the files so far apart.
Maybe this is just a workflow I'm new to, but with the folder separation I can't do my typical "leave the finder window open and use it to manage your files" workflow I'm used to on Windows. I could use spotlight to make a "smart folder" "containing" everything, but then I can’t click + drag files into that 'folder' so they’re accessible to other applications. It seems I could force FCP to put everything where I want it to be, but since it's not a per-project setting, I would need to re-set four folder settings each time I open a project - and I'm bound to accidentally forget once or twice, which would really mess things up.
So, I guess the reason I'm here (since FCP seems reliant on maintaining it's way of doing things) is to see if I can ask some of you to persuade me why doing things FCP's way is better. I've looked at a number of FCP workflow tutorials and none of them even hint at the thought that FCP's workflow is flawed - they all go merrily about showing you how to use it.
Is there some big obvious thing I'm missing? Some reason I should want my files chaotically organized across a number of different drives? Apart from the assumption I'm going to be deleting my caches and media files (like I said - I think is fairly rare), I can't see one single advantage in this. It's certainly not redundancy - it only takes one of your drives dying to knock out your project for sure.
Sorry for the long post. I'd just like to do things right... and usually that means accepting the manufacturer's defaults. But I'd really like to understand why first.
Thanks.
Mac OS X (10.4.8)
Welcome to the forum Oreckel!
The best way to work with FCP's media files is to not overthink it. It's all done from the "Scratch Disk" settings. Just select a DRIVE for media captures and renders to go to. FCP handles the rest. It creates a folder called "Capture Scratch", another called "Renders" and a third called "Audio Renders". In each of these folders it creates a folder for each project file containing the media that is associated with that particular project, and it names these folders the same as your project files' names. Couldn't be easier.
Autosave Vaults, Waveforms, and Thumbnails should be kept on your startup disk in your documents folder. You probably already have one there named "Final Cut Pro Documents" If it's there just select the Documents folder and FCP will put these three folders in the one named "Final Cut Pro Documents".
Jerry
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