Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Considering media storage
Before you begin working with Final Cut Pro, take a moment to think about where to store the media files for
the projects that you'll be working on. It's considered good practice to store media files on a separate dedicated
hard drive and not on the same drive as your Mac's operating system. Setting up a second drive for your media
allows the system drive to be in charge of running the OS and applications and leaves the media drive to deal
with the edit's video playback. This spreads the workload that your computer has to perform, with each drive
being able to “concentrate” on its own thing.
Video files take up a lot of disk space, and some formats need more space than others. Your choice of video
format dictates how large a drive you'll need, as well as how the drive needs to be connected to your computer.
Editing demands a large amount of video to travel at a sustained rate to and from the media drive. Therefore, the
drive's interface must be capable of coping with the bandwidth or throughput that your chosen format requires.
Unless you plan to work with uncompressed HD footage, a 7200-rpm drive with a FireWire 800 connection
should be enough to get you started for most general video work.
Once you have a dedicated media drive connected to your Mac, you can use it to store the
Final Cut
Events
and
Final Cut Projects
folders discussed earlier by selecting the drive in the Event and Project
library whenever you create a new Event or Project. Final Cut Pro can be set up to import any new media direc-
tly into these folders or can be configured to read media placed elsewhere on the drive. These settings are selec-
ted in the Import Preferences window and are discussed in Chapter 3.
Copying the media to your hard drive
This topic comes with a DVD containing all the media that you need to follow along with the topic. To access
this material, make sure that your hard drive has at least 30GB of available disk space and insert the disc into
your Mac's DVD drive. The DVD contains a disc image file named
Craft of the Cut
. Copy this file to
your Mac by dragging it to the Desktop or an external drive. Once the file has copied, you can eject the DVD.
Make sure Final Cut Pro is not open, and double-click the
Craft of the Cut
disc image to mount it. The
disc image appears as a drive under the devices section in the Mac's Finder. Inside, you'll find some folders in-
cluding the
Final Cut Events
and
Final Cut Projects
folders discussed earlier. When you launch
the program, Final Cut Pro treats the mounted disc image just like any normal hard drive, and the Events and
Projects from these folders are available from within Final Cut Pro.
If you've moved or deleted any files that are in use, Final Cut Pro views this media as being offline and displays
a red background with an exclamation point icon in place of the missing media (see Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2
A Final Cut Pro Project with offline media.
To relink missing clips inside an Event, do the following:
1.
In the Event Library, click the Event with the offline media and choose File
⇒
Relink Event Files.
