Final Cut Pro X Cookbook: Edit with style and ease using the latest editing technologies in Final Cut Pro X! with this book and ebook.

Creating a camera archive is the simplest and best way to make a backup of your raw footage. Tapeless cameras often store their media in really weird-looking ways with complex folder structures. In many cases, FCPX needs that exact folder structure in order to easily import the media.

A camera archive essentially takes a snapshot or image of your camera's currently stored media and saves it to one simple file that you can access in FCPX over and over again. This of course also frees you to delete the contents of the memory card or media drive and reuse it for another shoot.

In the Camera Import window, make sure your camera is selected in the left column and click on the Create Archive button in the bottom left corner. The resulting window will let you name the archive and pick a destination drive. Obviously, store your archive on an external drive if it's for backup purposes. If you were to keep it on the same drive as your FCPX system and the drive fails, you'd lose your backup as well!

The process creates a proprietary disk image with the original file structure of the memory card. FCPX needs the original file structure (not just the video files) in order to properly capture from the card. By default, it stores the archive in a folder called Final Cut Camera Archives on whatever drive you selected.

Later when you need to reimport from a camera archive, simply open the Camera Import window again, and if you don't see your needed archive under Camera Archives on the left, click on Open Archive... and find it in the resulting window.

If you've got the time, there's nothing to stop you from looking at each and every clip one at a time in the Import from Camera window, selecting a range, and then importing that one clip. However, that's going to take you a while as you'll have to deal with the settings window every time you click on the Import button. If you've got the storage space (and most of us do today), just import everything and worry about weeding out the trash later.

There are two web pages you should bookmark to keep up to date.

One is www.apple.com/finalcutpro/specs/. This web page lists most of the formats FCPX can work with. Expect this list to grow with future versions.

The second site is help.apple.com/finalcutpro/cameras/en/index.html. This web site lets you search camera models for compatibility with FCPX.

Just because a format isn't listed on Apple's specs page, doesn't mean it's impossible to work with. Many camera manufacturers release plugins which enhance a program's capabilities. One great example is Canon (www.canon.com), who released a plugin for FCPX allowing users to import MXF files from a wide variety of their cameras.

ClipWrap is far from the only solution out there, but it is definitely one of the best. The appendix of this book covers the basics of Compressor, Apple's compression software which can't convert raw AVCHD files in most cases, but can convert just about any file that QuickTime can play. The software company, iSkySoft, (www.iskysoft.com) makes a large number of video conversion tools for a reasonable price. If you're looking for a fully featured video encoding software package, look no further than Telestream Episode (www.telestream.net) or Sorenson Squeeze (www.sorensonmedia.com). These two applications are expensive, but can take just about any video file format out there and transcode it to almost anything else, with a wide variety of customizable settings.

As mentioned in step 3 in the previous section, we could have chosen to transcode to ProRes 422 instead of rewrapping. This is a totally fine option, just know the differences: transcoding, takes much longer, it takes up much more file space, but on the plus side, it is Final Cut Pro X's favorite format (because it's native to FCPX, made by Apple for Apple) and you may save time in the actual editing process by working with a faster more efficient codec once inside FCPX. If you chose to rewrap, you still have the option to transcode when you import into FCPX.

As always, when you import files into FCPX, you have the option of transcoding. If H.264 is readily accepted by FCPX, why transcode to ProRes? Well, while H.264 is a space-efficient video codec, it's not particularly edit-friendly. It takes a lot more processing power to modify and render H.264 files as they are heavily compressed. If you're creating a very simple or short project with H.264 files that is simply a series of cuts with maybe a few transitions and a title or two, you're probably fine to save time and skip the transcoding process. However, if your project is going to become more involved with lots of extras, including effects and color correction, take the time to transcode upfront. You'll save yourself a lot of time in the editing process and your computer will thank you for not stressing it out!

If your project hasn't really taken shape yet, but you know you want to import music from the Sound Browser to use later, you don't have to drag a song or sound effects directly into the timeline. Instead, simply click-and-drag them from the Sound Browser to the event of your choice in your Event Library. They will copy into the event and stay there until you are ready to use them. You can also apply keywords and make them favorites as well!

If you haven't done so already, run your Mac's Software Update. A download titled Final Cut Pro X Supplemental Content should appear that will install more than 1,300 high-quality sound effects that can be accessed in the Sound Browser. Additionally, it will download extra presets for the Space Designer plugin, covered in the Creating a surround sound space recipe.

If your project hasn't really taken shape yet, but you know you want to import photos from the Photos browser to use later, you don't have to drag a photo or photos directly into the timeline. Instead, simply click-and-drag them from the Photos browser to the event of your choosing. They will copy into the event in the Events browser and stay there until you are ready to use them. You can also apply keywords and make them favorites as well!

If you were creating a slideshow, this would seem like a pretty painful process if you had to drag 117 images into your timeline! Luckily, you can easily drag two or more images into the project by one of two methods. Once you've selected an event or album in the Photos browser, you can do any of the following:

Even if you're not going to use every image, sometimes this is a faster workflow so you can just easily delete the few images you don't want in your timeline as you go.

Some Mac users don't use Apple's various photo offerings, which is fine. Perhaps your photos are simply residing in a series of folders somewhere on your computer. You can import images using the File | Import command and choose an event to place them in. You can even drag images directly from their folder in Finder into the FCPX interface and drop them on top of the event of your choice as well!

Depending on your camera, FCPX may be able to detect starts and stops (when you click on Record and Pause) on your tape automatically. If it can, FCPX will split up your imported footage into individual clips!

Reports of tape capture problems in FCPX have been widely reported (such as dropped frames, missing video, and so on). As Apple pushes technology farther and faster, they tend to leave behind what they believe to be dying technologies (in this case, tape). Users who have run into various issues capturing from tape have also found better success by creating a camera archive of their footage first, then importing from that, rather than doing an immediate and direct import. Read the Creating a camera archive section for more info. When all else fails, try importing your footage into iMovie first, then import that project into FCPX!

Unless you consciously deleted it or changed settings in Photoshop before saving, chances are your .psd file will have a white background. When you import it into FCPX, that white background will still be there, but luckily, it's just a layer and can be deleted easily.

If you didn't have an active project you wanted to import from iMovie into FCPX, but simply wanted to take all of the media from your iMovie events, you can do this as well. In FCPX, just go to File | Import | iMovie Event Library. This will import every event you have in iMovie. It's an all or nothing deal!

Even if you have your preferences set to analyze all imported footage for people, stabilization, and so on, FCPX skips over this when importing iMovie projects. If you want to override this, you can have FCPX review your footage after the fact by selecting your clips, right-clicking, and choosing Analyze and Fix....

While 7toX does a Herculean feat of translating from FCP7 to FCPX, it isn't perfect, although not necessarily from a lack of effort on the part of the programmers. There are simply some things that cannot translate between the two programs given their radically different interfaces and features. This happens often when translating between two major programs (such as FCP7 to Adobe Premiere or vice versa).

All basic mechanics of editing from a FCP7 timeline translate—your clips and timing, many transitions, audio levels, and even some titles. However, a few things do not translate such as Motion 4 project files, offline media, sequence markers, travel mattes, and a few more.

The list of what does and doesn't translate is quite long and the makers of 7toX are committed to updating the program, so the best thing to do is read about the program in greater detail at www.assistedediting.intelligentassistance.com/7toX.

Intelligent Assistance also makes Xto7, which, as you can probably infer from the name, does the exact opposite as 7toX and will take a FCPX project and convert it so it can be imported into FCP7. Perhaps you've done a rough cut of your project quickly in FCPX, but really want to send your project to Color, Soundtrack Pro, or DVD Studio Pro. This is the answer. Read more about it at www.assistedediting.intelligentassistance.com/Xto7.

If you're the type of editor who knows in advance that they want to turn off auto-copy in FCPX upon import feature, then hopefully you're a pretty organized person. If not, be warned! Once you've imported media into FCPX manually without copying into the Final Cut Events folder, be careful not to move, rename, or delete any of your original media files or they will appear offline in FCPX!

If you choose to create optimized and/or proxy media upon import, FCPX does create and place the additional media files in the Final Cut Events folder even if you deselected Copy Files to Final Cut Events. That command only applies to the original media. Any transcoded clips must live in the Final Cut Events folder.

The previous exercise assumed you needed to relink media because of a mistake (losing track of your files). However, there are cases where you would purposely want to relink perfectly working, online clips to a different set of clips.

The simplest example is, if you happened to take your original media files into a different program for a task such as advanced color correction and you want to replace the modified files with the old, uncorrected ones you've been editing in FCPX. The process starts off the same as the exercise. Highlight the Event you want to relink and choose Relink Event Files.... This time, click on the All button, then click on Locate All..., and then find the folder with the new, modified media. This will allow you to relink all files in the Event, not just the ones that have gone missing.

As mentioned in step four in the previous section, relinking event files relinks every instance of an Event clip across all projects where that clip was referenced. If you only want to relink a clip (or clips) to one instance in one particular project, you can. Simply open the project of your choosing, highlight the clip(s) you want to relink, and finally, select File | Relink Project Clips. You will be brought to the same Relink Files window as in the exercise, only this time, when you relink media, it will only relink the specific instance(s) of media in this project and not across all projects.