With fcpx...Where is the best place to put your project and events..on your system drive...and your video on an external fast drive?...or everything on the external drive??? thank you

External firewire drive for projects & events works fine for me.

...so you have everything on the one drive...projects & events...and your uncut video?

Yes, the raw footage is in folders on my external drive. But I transcode upon import.
Projects and events also on the external drive. Seems to work for me; no problems to date (and I have been using since day 1 almost).

yea,Idid it that way too.then someone told to do it the other way...both ways work..I don't know which way is faster..or better??

Well I was of the impression that the best way to do it is to have the program (FCPX) sitting on the system drive, and everything else sitting on another drive. But I could be wrong.

Not so. The project folder contains a lot more than the project file. It contains all the high res render files generated in your project.

Tom Wolsky wrote:
So........what are you saying? Whats the best way to do it?

The events folder and the projects folder should be on your fast media drive, whether it's an internal drive in a tower or an external drive. Whatever you've using for your media is where your events and projects should be.

As Tom said. Reason is that when you start seriously editing, all of those media assets and render files will clog up the limited bandwidth of a single hard drive. So we let the OS and apps run off the system drive and have plenty of bandwidth. We put Projects and Events on a secondary drive (fastest you can get) so they can have all that bandwidth on that drive to send/receive data. And we don't put both on one to clog up bandwidth unnecessarily and cause issues.

Im still not sure how to do it....I have an iMac ,,,I put the project and event on the system drive...and and my uncut footage on my pegasus external thunderbolt drive, then import in to fcpx...please let me know if that's the right way to do it....thank you

Put all Events and Projects on the external drive.

Quit out of FCP X. Drag the "Final Cut Events" and "Final Cut Projects" from your system drive to the external drive.

Yes all Events/Projects should be on a secondary drive along with media assests. The OS and app itself runs off the internal system drive.

Now I want a good replacement for “save-as” and
“auto-save”
Its very thoughtful that the FCP dev team decided to add a back-up file every 15mins but that back-up file exists right along your main files and all your assets all on the same drive. If that drive goes down then I lose all my working project files, including the ONE backup that FCPX so kindly creates every 15mins, DOH!

Now I’m in the habit of making copies and moving some data around at the end of each work session but at this time I’m usually mentally exhausted and thats when mistakes happened. This is my biggest concern when thinking about starting a big project in FCPX.

In legacy FCP it was as simple as having my auto-save running and at the end of each session doing a save-as whilst naming the project file with a date/timestamp on it, took all but 2 seconds to do.
I know that due to the database structure of FCPX this is just not so cut and dry but I’d love to hear suggestions on routinely backing up/versioning work-in-progress.

Backup hard drive, Carbon Copy Cloner, schedule nightly backups.

Aside from that, the only option is to fill out the feedback form, again.

Mickey G wrote:
Pro Versioner works very well for me. Would not start a large project without it.

Mickey G wrote:
Cmd-D (duplicate). I usually unclick the box that says to save render files. That make the duplicate project folder small enough to keep lots of copies.

On my Mac Pro, I have a 500gb 7200 Hybrid Drive with System and Application files and nothing else. I have a CalDigit Raid card and an HD Element 4x1.5 external raid in RAID 0. The CalDigit raid card is also raiding (in RAID 5) the 4 internal bays with 8 TBs. The Internal raid is my Time-Machine volume and the external RAID is my Media RAID. This way, if my Mac Pro goes down, I can move it to my other MacPro which also has a CalDigit Raid card. Because the Time Machine volume is on a really fast RAID, I never have any slowdown on hourly backups.

When I'm editing, I usually version up at least once a day or when there's a major structural change to the edit. The only way I know to version up is to dupe your Project (but not the Event) and put the old version in a folder to get them out of the way.

When the job's over, I archive everything off my system by copying everything from the Events folder to an Events archive on a 1TB drive and copying the Projects to a Projects archive on the same external drive (I use bare drives in a drive dock). I then dupe this HD to another drive and take it off site. If I have to get back to the project, I restore the Project folders and Event folders to my main media drive and everything seems to work just fine.

What I'm finding interesting, especially in the new age of Thunderbolt, is that it's really not that important to have massive internal drives anymore and just have a drive big enough for programs and system. That's why having a 248 gb SSD is no longer a drag. Keep all your media off you main drive and have the rest on portable/removable drives!

Great suggestions on back/versioning methods.

Thanks

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