From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Importing assets: Copying vs. leaving files in place - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

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Importing assets: Copying vs. leaving files in place

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to start to ingest material into Final Cut that we just saw on the system level contained within the exercise files. So a few movies ago, we created our first Final Cut Pro X library and automatically, we got an event with today's date on it. Let's rename this event. By the way, you can actually single-click here in the upper left-hand corner of the name. And we're just going to call this Chocolate Media. I'll just press Return. And with this event selected, we're now going to choose to import media. I want to draw your attention, first of all, to the top right-hand corner of the Media Import dialog window and note that that event that we've targeted is the one that's currently selected. But we can actually choose to create a new event here and then have our media imported inside of there. So let's navigate to the footage that we'll be bringing in, which happens to be on our desktop. I've actually created a favorite over here on the sidebar. And if you go into your Final Cut Pro X Essentials folder, into the Assets folder, let's actually double-click the Chocolates folder and then we can see all of our Chocolate Media. Let's target our interview folder, so we're going to select that. And by the way, if you press the disclosure triangle, you'll see that it has a series of clips. Now, this is what we want to bring inside of Final Cut. The question now becomes, how will we bring it inside? And the answer's revealed on the right-hand side of this interface. By default, it's going to want to copy these files to the library. What this means is that in the background, Final Cut is going to make a duplicate copy of all of these clips. So these clips exist in the desktop right now and it's going to place it into the Final Cut Pro X library, which we saved in our Movies folder under our username. So we're going to have two existing copies of our media. The good news is that if we ever want to hand off our media to another editor, all of the media is contained inside the library rather than linking to that media of where it exists now, which is the desktop. The bad news is that we now need double the amount of space that we originally needed 'cause we need space to hold our original media that exists on the desktop and now, the duplicate copies that we'll be creating inside the Final Cut Pro X library. So let's just choose this Copy to Library option. I pointed out before that there is a series of folders here, but what's going to happen is Final Cut's going to take this folder, Interviews, and actually create a keyword collection out of it, which is a way of us organizing material in Final Cut and that we'll create on our own inside of Final Cut in the next chapter. So it's going to create folders from basically keywords from the folders. But if any of this media has Finder tags, it will also create a folder as well. We created a Finder tag in the last movie if you're curious. The rest of the options, we'll explore a little bit later. But some of these allow us to create additional files to optimize our project of working in Final Cut or even creating things such as approximations when we have materials that is, like, 4K in size. But just to see what Copy to Library means right now, let's import selected, noting that this window's going to close after import has started. Now, you'll see that Final Cut is automatically containing a series of clips and in the background, a process started. So I clicked on this little button to show you that there's a background task. And since I'm on a iMac Pro, it happens so quick, but it basically created copies of our media. Now, to see where these clips now reside, you can actually select any one of these clips and press Ctrl-click and choose to reveal it in the Finder. Right now, this is actually going to spit us out to a window where our original media is contained. I want to show you that it's in the first library we created. So it happens to be there in the event that we just renamed under the Original Media file folder. And you'll see that now, I've got a copy of this media here as well as it still exists on the desktop. But Final Cut Pro X is existing through the copies it just created within the library. So let's compare that to the other way of importing. I'm actually going to head back to Final Cut. And you might have noticed that the Import Media box is no longer available here in the browser because there's clips. But rest assured, if you go to the File menu and choose Import, we can go and import media again or press Command-I. This time around, I'm actually going to head up to the Broll folder and I'll go to the Kitchen Broll. You might recall in the last movie that some of these truffle clips that actually contain tags, which we've identified as Truffle Process and Avocado Truffle Process. So we want to select this entire folder. But this time, we're going to leave files in place, meaning it's not going to make copies and place them inside the Final Cut Pro X library. But we do want it to create keyword collections from the Finder tags that are on the clips as well as from the folder they exist in, which happens to be the Kitchen Broll. With everything else unchecked, minus this Close Window After Starting Import, we will import the selected into Final Cut Pro X. And all of a sudden, let me draw your attention to a few things. One is that underneath the event are a couple of keyword collections. Some of these keyword collections are based on the name of the folders that the clips were in on your system, such as Interviews or Kitchen Broll. Now, remember those Finder tags, those tags that you can add onto clips by pressing Command-I at the Finder level. The Truffle Process contains several clips that were identified with these tags and the Avocado Process also contains the same. And it's just a great way to see only certain parts of my media. We can also create these keyword collections from scratch in Final Cut at anytime we want and add media to those appropriate keyword collections. Now, at least some of these clips aren't copied to the library such as pretty much any of the Broll. So if I head here to the Kitchen Broll keyword collection and I select a clip and right-click it, choosing to reveal it in the Finder, we'll see a little bit of a difference between these clips. And that is that right now, Final Cut actually just shot me out to the desktop. So you see I'm in the Kitchen Broll folder. If I scroll over here to the side, all my files exist on the desktop and this is where it's pointing to in terms of the clips. So in one instance, we've got clips that are now associated or inside the Final Cut Pro X library. Those are the ones we copied to the library. And here are the clips that were left in place, the ones from the Kitchen Broll folder. This is something really important to note. Let me actually head to the Movies folder. And inside the Final Cut Pro X library, I'm going to right-click it and show package content. We'll head here to the event where we have those original media files. I just want to show you that any media that was left in place actually has a pointer file. It's basically a QuickTime file with an arrow and it's really just pointing to where that file exists on your operating system or on an external drive. So it's right now pointing to those files that were left in place on the desktop. And that is how you import footage into Final Cut and a little bit about the differences between copying files versus leaving them.

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