Libraries vs. event organization

- In this movie we'll look at creating a library and event in Final Cut Pro to set up for importing the clips we organized on our system in the last exercise. Let's think of the Final Cut Pro X library similar to a real one where we go to borrow books. Inside them are a series of shelves that have books organized by subject matter or theme. Similar in Final Cut Pro we have events. Events are where we will store our footage, audio, and graphical assets. We could create a series of events in our library for each day we shot for a client or have one event that had multiple keywords and Smart Collections that identify different types of assets.

Let's see how this all comes together. This is a time to launch Final Cut if you haven't done so, and you can simply do that if you have Final Cut on your dock by single-clicking it or in your applications folder on the Mac double-click it. What you might see here is a untitled library the first time that you come into Final Cut. What I'd like you to do here on the side is select it, and from the File menu you're going to choose Close Library. It's grayed out here for me because I currently have already set my Final Cut to now show a library when I launch it for the first time.

We're just going to go through the process of creating a library by default and seeing the difference between library and event organization in this movie. So I'm going to come here File, New, and Create a Library. This library we're actually going to be using over the next few lessons, so you want to take care of where you actually save this to keep track of it. By default the library happens to be saved in your Movies folder under your user name. If I click this downward arrow just note that you'll see that the majority of Final Cut libraries will be stored in this location.

I'm going to change this name from Untitled to FCPX Imports. We're going to be importing clips in the next chapter. With that saved, after I press Save, we'll see Final Cut, the library shows up here. Now you know it's in your Movies folder. You can take that and move it at any time you want. It doesn't have to exist there. Actually you can put it on an external drive depending on how you want to optimize your system. Notice here that while we have a library, inside that library happens to be an event.

The event takes place or the name of the event will be whatever today's date is. I like in a project to have two events, and these events could be where our clips live, they could be eventually where our stills live. You could have events for each different type of footage or material that you have, but events live inside the library. I'm going to rename this event as I would like footage to go here to actually be Footage. What'd I'd like to do is also create a new event under this library by selecting the library and going to the File menu and choosing New, Events.

What happens here is it will trigger us to decide where we'd like to save the events, and it happens to be in this library that we currently have named. What I'd like to do is actually call it Projects. One great part here is that when we create a new project or slash sequence, it can exist in this event right here if we wanted to that for our default at this point in time. Since I don't I'm going to leave this unchecked and just go over here to press Okay. I've got two separate events that live inside the Final Cut Pro X Import library.

One other thing about library organization is it's been mentioned that it comes with a series of Smart Collections. If we take a look here in the Smart Collection folder, you'll notice here that any video, audio, any projects or stills that exist in this library would be populated in these given categories. In order to see them, all you have to do is select them. The minute that we start importing material into Final Cut, we're going to see them populate up here at the library level, but keep in mind that your footage is going to exist in whatever event is targeted.

There are some differences between your library as well as event organization.