Importing/Transcoding best practices

Hello
Apologies if this is a very basic question: I just returned from Africa and I have many hours of video as a result. All videos are 1080p, high quality and what not, and vary from 30s to 30 minutes in length. Therefore, some files are a few megabytes, other, a few gigabytes.
The output for my project is no more than 7 minutes or so, therefore I have to cut a lot.
My question: what is the best practice when you have this much video? Should I import and transcode everything (all 73GB of video) or is there a best practice to say cut what you need, then transcode that.
I am using a MBPr 15" with 16GB and 512GB, so I've unchecked the "Copy files to Final Cut Events Folder" in order to not eat up my local HD.
Anyhow, any advice would be really appreciated, thanks again
Rob

First, thank you for your quick reply and being very nice to me seeing as my questions are probably very basic. I have purchased a book on FCPx but it didn't deal with workflows very well, especially with what I'm dealing with.
"I'd suggest you acquire a large external drive":
Done, I'm using a 1TB USB3 drive specifically for this project. All videos are loaded onto the HD and when I began importing, I checked off the option to "Copy files to FCPx events folder" in order to centralize my content to the HD. That said, the Events Folder on the local HD DOES have content, pointers I believe. Should I be backing those up to the external HD?
"Before capturing footage create a CDL (capture decision list) and capture what you intend to use."
Not done. Some of the footage I have didn't lend itself for this unfortunately. For example, I had a gopro camera mounted on my head and another mounted on the head of a local tribesman while we went hunting for small game (their food of course). So the videos are long and I'd like to include portions of it into the final video. Is the only option for me to import and optimize the whole thing, or can I import, not optimize, review, cut, save the portions I like, then optimize those sections?
I'm hoping you can spare a little more patience for me. I'm a photog so my workflow there is solid. I'm very new at this and I'd like to get better. The management of files for me is key so I want to get off on the right foot.
Cheers
Rob

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Hi David,
I would leave your query
"Am I doing something wrong and did I miss something that would prevent this problem?"
to the experts/ gurus out here on this forum.
From my end, you can follow
TOP 10 EXCEL TIPS FOR SUCCESS
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/204c3259-edb2-2b10-4a84-a754c9e1aea8
Please follow the Xcelsius Best Practices at
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/a084a11c-6564-2b10-79ac-cc1eb3f017ac
In order to reduce the size of xlf and swf files follow
http://myxcelsius.com/2009/03/18/reduce-the-size-of-your-xlf-and-swf-files/
Hope this helps to certain extent.
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Nikhil

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